Microsoft Copilot
Conversational AI woven into the operating system and office apps
WHAT IT IS
Microsoft Copilot is a conversational assistant Microsoft introduced in September 2023, wiring large models into product lines such as Windows, the Edge browser and Microsoft 365. It is built on OpenAI’s models and offers web question answering, content generation and a system-level entry point. Different editions target individual users and enterprise office scenarios respectively.
Why it matters
By putting conversational AI directly into the operating system and office software, it was a broad attempt to distribute AI through existing product lines.
Key specs
- Form
- Assistant on the web, in Windows, Edge and Microsoft 365
- Models
- Built on OpenAI models
- Modality
- Text, image, audio in; text, image out
Capabilities
Conversation & Instruction Following
Understand intent across turns and act on it
Text Generation
Continue a passage, one word at a time
Summarization
Compress a long text into a shorter, faithful one
Question Answering & RAG
Retrieve the evidence first, then answer from it
Related concepts
Prompting & Alignment
Making a model helpful, honest and harmless is harder than simply making it bigger
Agents & Tool Use
Let a model do more than answer: search, call APIs, run code — and decide the next step from what came back
Inference Optimization & Serving
Training happens once; inference happens a billion times a day — and serving is torn between fast first tokens and high throughput, which usually pull against each other
Comparable products
ChatGPT
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Gemini
2024One chat entry point that gathers search, office apps and a multimodal model
Perplexity
2022Answers built as it searches, each one backed by sources
Claude
2023A general chat model known for long context and safety alignment
NotebookLM
2023Answers only from the sources you give it, with citations
Apple Intelligence
2024System-level AI that splits work between on-device and private cloud
DeepL Translator
2017A neural machine translation service that bets on translation quality