Microsoft’s Copilot AI receives personalized updates

Microsoft has announced a range of changes for its Microsoft Copilot AI during Microsoft Ignite today, making the chatbot more interactive and participatory, especially in Teams meetings. The updates expand Copilot’s role as an enterprise helper in Office apps like Teams, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

One of the key updates is the addition of flexibility to the chatbot’s output, allowing users to customize its formatting and tone to their personal liking. Initially, Word and PowerPoint will receive the new personalization features, with plans to extend support to other Microsoft 365 apps in the future.

Microsoft also announced changes to how Copilot will function in Teams meetings next year. Copilot will start taking notes during meetings and share them with participants afterward. Users can prompt the chatbot to “quote” a specific person for a transcription, enabling it to jot down what they say.

Microsoft has separated Copilot from meeting transcriptions, allowing meeting participants to interact with the bot during the Teams session without recording those interactions. Aside from answering questions, the bot will create real-time notes and can be prompted to record quotes from specific people.

Copilot will now offer to visualize things in Whiteboard, like meeting discussion points, and the whiteboard will be shared with each person in the meeting for collaboration.

In PowerPoint, workers will soon be able to point the chatbot at their company’s image library and utilize Microsoft Designer to modify them. In the spring, Copilot will be able to prepare users for meetings by pulling together relevant information from Outlook emails, calendar invites, and related documents. Additionally, Copilot in Word will soon gain the ability to catch users up with document revisions.

Microsoft has also announced new Copilot packages: Copilot for Dynamics 365; Copilot for Service; and Copilot for Sales. In Dynamics 365, Copilot will offer quick answers for field technicians, while the service version (coming in early 2024) is intended for “agent-assisted support,” providing answers and personalized resources for customers. Copilot for Sales (coming in the first quarter of 2024) will serve as a medium for accessing information, with a particular focus on AI-generated meeting briefs that pull in customer details and names and titles of meeting attendees, among other features.