Copilot Kudos and Confusion (Premium)

The biggest and best surprise at today’s Microsoft Special Event was the firm’s total shift to the Copilot branding. I rarely get to compliment Microsoft’s branding and marketing, but Copilot isn’t just perfect, it’s inspired. And it solves the problem it introduced in February when it went public with its AI efforts using its most horrible brand, Bing.

But it’s better than that. Between March and May this year, Microsoft announced several new “copilot” products, each with its own brand, including the Microsoft 365 Copilot and Windows Copilot. What changed today is that Microsoft revealed that each of these previously separate copilots is being unified into a single AI experience that will be used across multiple products and service. It’s called Microsoft Copilot, or just Copilot, and … yep. Perfect.

Well, nearly perfect. Microsoft Copilot will be added to Windows 11 (what used to be called Windows Copilot), Bing, Microsoft Edge, and Microsoft 365 Copilot. That last one is confusing. Is it a typo? Don’t we really mean “Microsoft 365,” as in the Microsoft Copilot being integrated into Microsoft 365? It’s not clear: Microsoft’s documentation is either wrong or they are literally keeping the old Microsoft 365 Copilot branding. Here’s my theory: Because Microsoft 365 Copilot is a paid offering on top of (also paid) Microsoft 365 subscription tiers, that name is in some way concise. If true, I still find it confusing.

And this raises more questions: I was delighted to hear that a consumer version of Microsoft 365 Copilot is on the way, and that a select few are testing it now in a private preview. Microsoft never said during the event when it would be made more broadly available, but they told us privately that will happen in early 2024. So … will it be free, like the Copilot capabilities in Bing and Edge? Or will it be paid, like Microsoft 365 Copilot for businesses? Microsoft isn’t saying. But I’m guessing it will cost us.

Copilot—sorry, Microsoft Copilot—also has a colorful new icon that will be used across the board, meaning in Bing, Edge, Windows, and in Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams (which are all part of Microsoft 365). This is great on a number of levels—this more appropriate icon will replace the horrific blue Bing icon that desecrates Edge now—and I love it. De-emphasizing Bing was always the right decision.

So let’s look at the individual products and see what’s changed with Microsoft Copilot.

Windows 11 version 23H2—available in preview form on September 26, see my other post about the confusion around this reveal—will have several AI-based and non-AI features.

On the AI front, we have a preview version of Copilot with its own Taskbar button (and WINKEY + C shortcut), a new version of the Paint app with background removal capabilities (and, intriguingly, “a preview of Cocreator that brings the power of generative AI to the Paint app,” something that was not mentioned in the presentation), a new version of the Photos app with background blur capabilities, a new version of the Snipping Tool that can extract text from images, and a new version of Clipchamp with an Auto Compose feature.

Stepping past AI, 23H2 will include the modernized File Explorer with an integrated (photo) Gallery view, a new version of Notepad with auto-save, Narrator improvements related to voice access and new natural voices, the new Outlook app, and the Windows Backup utility, which is really about migrating to a new PC, not backup.

Copilot is, of course, the marquee feature, but if you look back at my hands-on preview from June, you’ll find that the experience was, at that time, lackluster. So what’s changed?

A few things, actually. As before, Copilot in Windows—still getting used to that term—combines the capabilities of Bing Chat with a small set of Windows-specific actions that will clearly expand over time. Commercial customers will be able to enable Bing Chat Enterprise, which we already knew. ” (We’ll provide information on new functionality when available so stay tuned for updates!” is how Microsoft summarizes this.)

But new to this event, Copilot will be “infused” into the Windows shell and apps. It will integrate with Copy and Paste, turning it into Copy, Paste, Do. And a new feature called Ink Anywhere that lets you use Ink literally anywhere in Windows, without ever needing the keyboard, touchpad, or touch. Most intriguingly, Copilot will work across devices, so that you can integrate phone-base information like text messages from Windows. I assume this will arrive via a Phone Link update.

Bing and Microsoft Edge are often mentioned together when it comes to AI capabilities, and that was true of this event as well. It makes sense: Yes, Bing is available on the web, but Microsoft is also building its AI capabilities into the browser, and so whatever happens in one happens in the other.

The biggest change here is what I said up front: Microsoft is removing the terrible Bing logo button from the top right corner of Edge and replacing it with a new and less offensive Microsoft Copilot logo button. But there is more, of course.

The biggest, I think, is Bing Image Creator, which is getting a major DALL-E 3 upgrade that will significantly improve the quality of the images it makes. Seriously, it’s incredible. (And in the future, Microsoft Designer will be integrated so that you can further edit those creations.) Bing Chat is getting personalized answer capabilities by considering your chat history. Bing Shopping will now use AI to help you find exactly the right products. And though this wasn’t discussed at the event, Microsoft is bringing digital watermarking to AI-generated images in Bing, and this capability is coming to Paint and Microsoft Designer too. Hm.

From what I can tell, Microsoft 365 was the big winner at this event. This makes sense, given how many products and services it covers. (On the app front, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams will all get Copilot capabilities.) But also because there are commercial and consumer versions of the service. And because, as noted, there will be a consumer version of the Microsoft 365 Copilot too, though details are scarce.

The big news today was Microsoft 365 Chat, which was announced in March as Business Chat. Since then, there have been big advances, and Microsoft 365 Chat now works like an assistant, using data from emails, meetings, chats, documents, and the web to help you start or complete your most complex or tedious tasks. There’s a bit of Big Brother to this, because there has to be—Chat “reads emails, attends meetings, knows what’s in files,” and so on—and it can create AI-based summaries of your coming day.

According to Microsoft, the Microsoft 365 Copilot starts to feel like a conversation, and it becomes quite natural. And it will make all those small but important things that are often hard—punctuation, spelling, structure—better, especially when it understands the context better. To help people get up to speed, there’s a new Copilot Lab that will help people get better at creating prompts.

The Surface announcements were underwhelming. Microsoft brought out two new Surface PCs at the event, the Surface Laptop Studio 2 and Surface Laptop Go 3. But there were two other new Surface devices for us to check out after the presentation, the Surface Hub 3 (50- and 85-inch versions) and Surface Go 4 for Business.

Of these, only the Laptop Studio 2 contains an AI-capable chipset, or NPU (neural processing unit). And this one was confusing because it’s powered by 13th Gen Intel Core H-series processors, which are mobile parts and do not include an NPU. But we have since learned that the NPU is a separate part, an Intel Gen3 Movidius 3700VC VPU AI Accelerator. (14th Gen Intel Core mobile processors will include this on the die with the CPU.)

Overall, the event was interesting, but I was expecting more, especially around third-party support for the Copilot plug-in model. But then I think my theory about Microsoft adding new Copilot features regularly each month for the foreseeable future is correct. It worked for Teams, after all.