Microsoft's Copilot Pro currently provides access to AI-powered features in certain Office applications, as well as priority access to the latest OpenAI models and improved image generation.
Does it meet my day-to-day needs? Does AI image and text generation really sound good in Office applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint?
Let's dive into what you can get with Copilot Pro today.
Designer image creation
One of the main attractions of subscribing to Copilot Pro is an improved version of Microsoft's image creation tool, Designer.
Designer uses OpenAI's DALL-E 3 model to generate content, and the paid Copilot Pro version creates widescreen images in more detail than the free version.
Asking the designer "An image of a dachshund sitting by the window staring at a slice of bacon" yields some good examples.
Adding more descriptive language can produce "hyper-realistic paintings" with "natural light, medium ground, and shallow depth of field" that will greatly improve the image.
As you can see in the two examples below, Designer gets the right amount of natural light and a certain depth of field around the bacon.
"A surreal painting of a dachshund sitting by the window, staring at a slice of bacon, natural light, medium ground, shallow depth of field. ”
"There was no request for that huge piece of bacon. ”
As with most things involving AI, the Designer features aren't perfect. DALL-E 3 still struggles with text, especially when you ask Designer to add a label or logo with text written on it.
It does a good job of completing the "illustrated image of a UPS delivery man in 1910." "In the style of early Japanese cartoons, though, the UPS logo was added – even if it's a little quirky.
Copilot Pro lets you generate 100 images per day, and it's much faster than the free version.
"Illustrated image of a UPS delivery man in 1910. In the style of early Japanese cartoons. ”
Copilot in office software
In Word, you can use Copilot to generate text, which can help you get started with getting an outline of your document or refining paragraphs.
If you have numeric data, you can also have Copilot visualize that data as a graph or table, which is especially useful for making text-heavy documents easier to read.
If you highlight text, a small Copilot logo will appear, prompting you to select it to rewrite or visualize it.
If you select an entire paragraph, Copilot will try to rewrite it with different options that you can cycle through and choose.
You can quickly visualize the data as a table in a Word document.
As with image generation, paragraph rewriting can be a bit of a hit-and-do, introducing a different meaning to a sentence by swapping words.
Copilot in Outlook seems to be very useful. I use it every day to check the summaries of my emails and these summaries are helpful to appear at the top of the emails.
Email summaries in Copilot for Outlook are very useful.
It's also very helpful when you have a long-running email thread to get a quick summary of all the key information.
You can also use Copilot in Outlook to generate emails or craft responses.
If you're not used to creating presentations, Copilot in PowerPoint is just as useful.
You can ask it to generate a specific style of slideshow, and you will get the entire slide in a matter of seconds.
Designer is part of this feature, so you can drill down into each slide and modify the image or text.
Co-pilot in PowerPoint.
Copilot in Excel seems to be the most limited part of the Copilot Pro experience right now.
You need to arrange the data neatly in a table. Otherwise, Copilot will need to convert it.
Once you have data that you can use with Copilot, you can create visualizations, use data insights to create pivot tables, and even get formula suggestions.
GPT Copilot 和未来
Microsoft has also launched a number of GPTs for fitness, travel, and cooking.
These are essentially personal assistants inside Copilot that can help you find recipes, plan vacation itineraries, or create personalized workout plans.
Overall, Copilot Pro is a good start to Microsoft's consumer AI efforts, at least the improvements in image generation are pretty solid here.