Surprise! Microsoft Copilot Pro is Magical (Premium)

When Microsoft announced Copilot Pro last week, I waded into an unfamiliar new world of AI-based productivity and creativity, and I emerged with a positive new outlook. I was surprised by what I found, in a good way. But my key takeaway is perhaps the biggest surprise. I’m going to keep paying for this thing.

Yes, I hope it gets cheaper: $20 per month is a tough pill to swallow in the context of my Microsoft 365 Family subscription, which comes out to about $8.35 per month and serves me and 5 other people in my extended family. But here’s the bottom line: Even if I just used this for one key feature, I can justify this service as a work-related expense. And if that’s true, then the other benefits are just icing on the proverbial cake.

I don’t have much in the way of comparison here: I’ve used the free versions of ChatGPT, DALL-E, Microsoft Copilot, of course, and what’s now called Image Creator from Designer. But Copilot Pro should also be viewed against OpenAI ChatGPT Plus and maybe that’s something I’ll look into eventually.

But let’s get real here: Microsoft has a dominant and maybe unassailable position in office productivity, and I’m intrigued by how it is integrating native AI capabilities into its core Office applications. This is potentially the big differentiator with ChatGPT Plus and whatever other AI innovations arrive this year from other companies.

The sign-up experience was painful and, frankly, embarrassing. That said, it was also day one, and so after failing spectacularly throughout the day on January 15, when Microsoft first announced the service, I finally gave up and waited until the following morning. And when I tried again that day, I had no issues: Microsoft was happy to take my $20 and I could finally take a look.

Copilot Pro, as you may recall, currently offers three major sets of features: Priority access to Copilot and its GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo capabilities, landscape DALL-E 3 image creation with better performance and 100 “boosts” per day, and integrated Copilot capabilities in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook on Windows, Mac, and iPad. (A fourth new feature, the ability to create custom Copilot GPTs, whatever that means, using what I believe will be a web-based tool called Copilot GPT Builder.)

I had some questions. Now mostly answered.

Microsoft is explicit about which platforms support Copilot integration, as noted above. But wasn’t clear to me where I can access the Copilot text and image capabilities. On the web, of course: Both work fine from the Copilot website. But what about the Windows 11 Copilot sidebar? Or the Edge sidebar? Does my Microsoft account sign-in pass through my Pro status and provide me with the appropriate perks in those places too?

According to Microsoft, I can access Copilot Pro using a Copilot app on Windows, Mac, and iPad and the web in “Bing, Edge, and Start.” (Start?) But when I fire up Copilot on Windows 11, it displays a Copilot Pro badge, which is reassuring. Also reassuring, it works with text-based prompts, of course, but also image creation.

Speaking of which I love that I can finally generate images with a landscape aspect ratio because that’s what I need: The square images that DALL-E and Image Creator were less than ideal, and while DALL-E had a hard-to-use feature that could expand square images horizontally, it was a time-consuming extra step and Image Creator didn’t do this at all. (I will also point out that you can only create landscape images now, from what I can tell. Fine with me.)

But what’s a boost? According to the Copilot Pro product listing on Microsoft’s website, a boost isn’t the number of images you can create in a day, but is rather “the number of turns you have to create images faster,” and you get 15 of them a day. So it’s a boost in speed, not quality.

I will keep experimenting. But in the meantime, I have a few quick observations.

First, the image creation capabilities are what I was most interested in given my previous success creating images for this site with DALL-E and what used to be called Bing Image Creator, and the new landscape output. And this, so far, is the killer app for me given my work-related needs and the quality of the output. It’s impossible that regular readers haven’t noticed the AI-generated art I’ve used in several articles this past week. But I am delighted by the quality of both the images I chose and those I bypassed. There hasn’t been a dud in the bunch.

The best so far, and the most provocative by far, is the image it created for my recent editorial about Halo Infinite: All I prompted was “Halo Infinite reimagined as an oil painting in the style of a flemish master,” but what I got was an insane Halo-infused version of the Last Supper with a U.S.-style flag draped over the center of the table. For some glorious freaking reason. Crazy.

I’ve only just started experimenting with the integrated Office app capabilities, and naturally I’m focusing on Word for now, given my familiarity. (The ironic fact that I just stopped using Word isn’t lost on me. Yes, I wrote this post in Typora, without the aid from AI, aside from my Grammarly-based spell-checking.) But I can tell this immediately: Despite the apparently short list of Copilot Pro features in each app, and in Word specifically, this is a profound advance. And it will benefit natural writers—”good” writers, professional writers, whatever—as much as those who are uncomfortable in front of a keyboard.

In Word, you can use Copilot to start a document by explaining the topic you need to write about. This capability can help professionals get past writer’s block, by suggesting passages that can later be edited. But it can also help non-writers create an entire document, satisfying the promise that AI can be used to help those unfamiliar with a tool or process get going without needing external help.

In one example, I asked Copilot how generative AI would change the world for the better, and it responded by creating a bulleted list of surprisingly lofty ways related to healthcare, art and design, the environment, and education. I could have prompted it to expand on any or all of that, but I was thinking more about personal productivity and so I followed up with a prompt in that direction. After which Copilot created a nice outline that included automation, personalization, collaboration, and innovation (where people can use AI to “generate new ideas and solutions, allowing them to think more creatively and solve problems more effectively”)

For a professional writer or student, that’s a nice set of building blocks for a document, but I could see the less professional stopping right there. Either way, it was nicely done, and I had similar results with other topics related to video games, Big Tech, and so on.

Copilot can also be used to summarize an existing document, one of the key ways in which AI is generally useful these days. But you can also ask specific questions about a document, which I suspect would be particularly useful for longer works. And you can use it to change text that you and/or the AI created in your own documents. There are also nice prompt hints, like “What’s the call to action here?”

The UI works as expected. There’s a Copilot icon in the ribbon in both Word for Windows—which requires an update—and Word for the web that toggles a sidebar in keeping with the whole Copilot way of doing things. And a contextual Copilot icon appears to the left of the text in a document as you write and highlight text that triggers a menu with options like “Rewrite” and “Visualize like a table.” (You can use a keyboard shortcut, ALT + I, to trigger this menu too.)

Semi-related, you can also use a Designer ribbon icon to display a Designer pane that creates images based on selected text in the document, also useful. Ideas appear as thumbnails and are implemented inline as selected.

I went into this experiment with the cynical attitude of a professional writer who does not need this functionality. But the truth is, we all need this. I can’t and won’t use AI to create entire articles, but even I run into blocks sometimes, and this is a terrific way to get past a contorted word or phrase, or just a mental stumble so that I can get on with the work at hand. And less prolific and experienced writers will benefit even more.

Put simply, I’m surprised by how well this works. And this is early days: Not only will we see more Copilot capabilities across the Microsoft ecosystem, but we have that GPT Builder to look forward too.

I can’t wait to try that. Maybe I should figure out what it is first.