Microsoft Copilot is a Windows add-on designed to boost your productivity and make dull tasks easier. It’s early days for the assistant, but it’s already showing plenty of promise.
If you already have Copilot installed on your PC, it will appear on the Taskbar next to the Search box or icon. There’s a rainbow-coloured symbol which might have ‘Pre’ superimposed over it to show it’s a technology preview.
Below, we take a closer look at what Copilot has to offer and how the tool can potentially save you hours of time when dealing with documents and graphics.
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- Copilot was Included in the September 2023 (23H2) update for Windows 11. This hasn’t been rolled out to all Windows 11 devices
- Check yours by selecting the Start Menu > Settings app > System > About. Scroll down to Windows specifications and check ‘Version’
- If you have 23H2, you can open Copilot by using the Win + C keyboard shortcut
- To disable the AI tool, go to Settings > Personalisation > Taskbar > Copilot off
- If your version of Windows doesn’t have Copilot, try it out online at Microsoft Copilot for the web
How to get started
Somewhat unusually, and unlike Cortana or the current search system, Copilot opens as a bar on the right-hand side of your screen. You don’t need any more than the Microsoft account that you use with Windows to use it – there’s a login link on the Copilot bar, and you’ll need to be signed in if you want to create images.
We tried out a preview of Copilot. A version of this article featured in the February issue of Which? Tech Magazine.
1. Microsoft Copilot lets you create your own images
With Copilot, you don’t need to visit a specialist site for image generation, or go to the trouble of installing a machine-learning model that runs locally on the graphics processor of your PC. It can be done in Windows with just a line of type called a prompt. (Those of you using the online version should select Designer in the top right of your screen.)
We asked Copilot if it could generate images, and it responded by saying that it could, and went on to prove it by creating three pictures of a white cat wearing a red bow tie and a black hat. This last part was entirely unprompted and also quite cute.
After going hands-on with Copilot’s image functions, we saw that:
- It’s best to be general – asking for specific people won’t work unless they’re very famous – and you’ll often get a better result with pictures of animals. A prompt such as ‘male journalist working very hard on a feature for Which? Tech magazine’ got us four images – one is a masterpiece (below, left). It’s not very good at text, though, rendering a headline in another image as ‘Tecro Techrum’.
- Changing Copilot’s setting to be more creative can work wonders – as our fun image of a scientist shows (below, right). We only asked for an image of a mad scientist working on a desk full of tech, and then Copilot came up with the comic book style, steampunk aesthetic, the goggles, hairstyle and a flask of green liquid, plus all the background detail, all on its own, in just a few seconds.
- It can generate content for social media – The square images Copilot creates are saved in PNG format at a resolution of 1,024 x 1,024 pixels, which is just over one megapixel.
As these Al-generated images show, we’re still in the realm of an interesting novelty right now. Don’t look too closely, and you can easily be fooled. The details, however, give the game away. As the scientist image shows, though, we might not be that way for much longer.
2. Get Microsoft Copilot to write for you
Copilot lets you choose what style it responds to your queries in: choose from ‘More creative’, ‘Balanced’ or ‘More Precise’. It’s worth experimenting to see which suits you best for whatever you’re working on.
Type in your prompt – such as ‘write a message telling my friends about my birthday party’. Copilot will respond with what it thinks is most suitable. You can tweak your prompt if you want to improve the response.
Sometimes it can’t fulfil your request. For example, when we told it: ‘You are a professional journalist. Ask your boss for a pay rise’, it apologised and said it couldn’t do this as it’s an AI language model and does not have a boss.
Play around with it and see how to make it work for you.
3. Got Office? Microsoft Copilot can summarise entire documents in seconds
In Microsoft 365 Office apps, Copilot is selectable as an option on the Ribbon menu and opens as a sidebar. From there, you can ask it to perform tasks such as cutting non-essential text from a long document. For example, you can type ‘summarise this document’ and a summary of the much longer document is produced – but Microsoft warns you should check it.
Other supported prompts include ‘draft a two-page project proposal based on the data from [a document] and [a spreadsheet] or ‘create a one-page draft based on this rough outline’.
It handles spreadsheet tasks
In Excel, Microsoft shows prompts such as ‘give a breakdown of the sales by type and channel. Insert a table’ or ‘project the impact of [a variable change] and generate a chart to help visualise’.
These are routine data analysis tasks, and automating them could save you a lot of time if the results are accurate.
How much it costs for Office, plus how to get a free trial
You need to subscribe to Copilot Pro to use the AI with Office. It’s £19 a month, although you can get a one-month free trial – we recommend you try before you buy, as it’s not cheap. To find out more, go to the Microsoft Copilot webpage.
You can use Pro with the free Office tools online or, if you have a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription, in the apps. The Copilot subscription is for one user only – so don’t expect everyone to be able to use it if you have a Family subscription.
Microsoft 365 Business subscribers will pay £24.70 a month or £296.40 a year (not including VAT). Go to the Microsoft 365 Copilot page for more information.
The current limitations of Copilot
Copilot is entangled with the workings of your PC. You can ask it to change settings and open apps, as well as search the web, although we experienced very mixed results for this when we tried the preview version.
Changing settings
Copilot doesn’t directly change the settings, but it can make it easier for you to do so by opening the Settings app on the correct page – at least in theory.
Asking it to turn on the ‘wifi’ confused it, as it seemed to be expecting ‘Wi-Fi’, and it initially offered to turn on the Bluetooth or volume settings.
Asking for Bluetooth to be turned on was more straightforward, and it was extremely chatty, even sending the conservation with a smiley face emoji. However, the promised Settings app never appeared, and Bluetooth remained off. What it did manage to do was provide a set of instructions on how to turn on the wi-fi, as well as some extra resources sourced from the web.
Opening apps
Asking Copilot to ‘open www.which.co.uk’ in Chrome led to it opening a new window (the browser was already running), but it couldn’t type in the URL itself.
Other apps worked the same way. We had the Steam digital games platform installed on the PC we were testing Copilot on, so ‘open Steam’ led to a dialog asking us if we wanted Steam to open and a click of Yes opened the app. This may not be any faster for opening an app you already have a shortcut for on your desktop or Taskbar, but it may be better than rooting through the Start menu.
Elsewhere, typing ‘restart the PC’ led to a web search for how to restart your PC, and more strangely the Snipping Tool screenshot app opening, rather than the Power menu appearing.
Asking Copilot to open an image editing app led to a message that it couldn’t open that app with its ‘predefined tools’. Asking which apps it could open produced a long list, including Firefox, Steam, LibreOffice and the built-in Microsoft apps such as Teams and Maps.
Remember this was only a preview version of Copilot, and we can expect it to improve as time goes on.
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Additional reporting by Tom Morgan.
