Exploring the Future of Productivity with Microsoft Copilot Part 3
In my last blog post, I explored the capabilities of Excel when coupled with Microsoft Copilot, and I was pleasantly surprised. Now I’ve turned my attention to Microsoft Word.
What I should explain first is that there are two ‘sides’ to Microsoft Copilot: It is now possible to buy hardware, such as Laptops specifically enhanced for Copilot with the addition of an NPU (Neural Processing Unit), which is an extra chip on the motherboard specifically designed for AI. You can also add a Copilot subscription to your Office 365 license, which doesn’t rely on you having new hardware.
Back to Word and Copilot, I’ve long used AI, ChatGPT is a great resource, but in addition, I have also used tools such as Grammarly. Together they can help provide some basic structure when you’re struggling to formulate an idea and help maintain tone. So a lot can be achieved without spending money, so is it worth the additional cost of Microsoft Copilot?
I would have to say yes, not least because Microsoft Copilot brings with it the focus to improve productivity over and above creating/correcting your content. It also enhances your other Microsoft applications such as Excel and PowerPoint. Copilot will also look at your own/your company’s content – something ChatGPT cannot see. This opens up a lot more potential – for example you can ‘prompt’ Copilot to create a summary of multiple documents (or emails). This is shown clearly in the following architecture diagram:
The area ‘Microsoft Graph’ is your content and files etc. This is indexed and becomes a source for Copilot.
The actual experience of using Microsoft Copilot with MS Word is exactly as you would expect – it’s incredibly clever and helps kick-start documents. As always, I would caution everybody to thoroughly read what has been generated, to check facts.
In a way, using Microsoft Copilot and Word is less exciting than what I discovered when testing Excel, but this is because I’ve been using ChatGPT for a long time, so there’s a little less of a wow factor. However, this does not detract from the fact that this will be of great help to many, many people, especially those without a writing background.
Next time I will be looking at PowerPoint – is there a place for AI in this cornerstone of corporate presentations?