In the ongoing battle for supremacy between market leading AI chatbots and ChatGPT alternatives, Microsoft has played its next move.
The tech giant is launching a new suite of updates – that the company is calling ‘Wave 2’ – to its Copilot AI-powered digital assistant for Windows.
As well as tweaks that will integrate Copilot more seamlessly into Microsoft’s Word, Outlook and OneDrive programs, usability for businesses seems to be the main focus of the update; the introduction of a ‘dynamic canvas’ called Copilot Pages being the headline announcement.
Copilot Turns a New Page
Microsoft trumpeted Copilot Wave 2 with a blog post from Corporate Vice President Jared Spataro on the company’s website. Front and center of the post is the announcement of the new Copilot Pages tool.
“First, we’re announcing Copilot Pages—a dynamic, persistent canvas designed for multiplayer AI collaboration. It’s the first new digital artifact for the AI age.” – Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft
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Targeted towards use in businesses, Spataro explains that it’s a virtual canvas designed to be used by multiple collaborators that harnesses Copilot’s AI smarts.
“You and your team can work collaboratively in a page with Copilot,” he expands, “seeing everyone’s work in real time and iterating with Copilot like a partner”. It allows editing and sharing, together with the ability to add further content from other data sets, files and the internet.
Copilot Pages is set to roll out immediately for Microsoft Copilot 365 customers and later in the month for users of the AI tool’s free version.
The video below made available by Microsoft explains Copilot Pages further:
Copilot + Python
The tilt towards businesses with Wave 2 continues with the enhancements made to Copilot in Microsoft Excel.
As well as adding new features to its Excel skill set (e.g. more formulas, conditional formatting, better charts and tables, text recognition, etc), the blog contains details of how Copilot will integrate the Python programming language.
This, it says, will allow users to utilize Copilot to “conduct advanced analysis like forecasting, risk analysis, machine learning, and visualizing complex data”. And all without any additional knowledge of coding.
What Else is New for Wave 2?
Copilot agents is another newly announced tool that “uses AI to automate and execute business processes”. You can learn more from this dedicated blog post, but it appears to be a chatbot that you can tailor to answer internal company knowledge-base questions.
And Spataro’s post suggests that no Microsoft stone has been left unturned in improving Copilot’s functionality, citing the following further changes for the Wave 2 update:
- Word: Greater functionality to reference web data, emails and other files in your Word documents.
- Outlook: New ‘Prioritize my inbox’ tool will help you more quickly get to the messages you need by “analyzing your inbox based on both the content of your email and the context of your role”.
- Teams: Copilot will assess both the transcript of your video call and comments in the chat to provide overarching summaries of Teams calls and help you discover anything you may have missed.
- PowerPoint: Using the ‘Narrative builder’ tool, a few simple prompts help to quickly build the first draft of a presentation and then refine it thereafter.
- OneDrive: Copilot in OneDrive will ‘reason’ over all your files quickly to find the information you need without trawling through documents.
