Microsoft Co-Pilot gains 5 New Features: A First Look

Since Microsoft introduced Co-Pilot they've expanded it into their Microsoft 365 ecosystem of tools already, but they continue their expansion with OneNote, Outlook & other abilities.

Spanning into all of Microsoft Co-Pilots launches will fill this out fully, but we want to zoom into 5 key launches that interest us here on Tool Finder to understanding their broader plans and AI evolution of the 365 ecosystem of tools.

It is clear Microsoft Co-Pilot wants to be your buddy at work from their messaging and continued efforts with OpenAI development. These are some of the new features that come with the new Early Access update from Microsoft.

1. Whiteboard Gets AI

Miro and many other whiteboard tools are coming up with new ways to use AI within your concept boards and collaborating in real-time. Expanding ideas or even sparking them using a tool like this, with AI, can be a huge opportunity for many teams.

This is something that Microsoft have introduced in their Whiteboard tool known for collaborating inside Microsoft Teams and more. This will allow you to do one of three things whilst inside of Whiteboard, without leaving it.

• Summarise - bring together everything you are seeing on a board to get clarity on what everything is that you've thrown together, perfect for teams with ideas tumbling out.
• Suggest - basically a cheat sheet to getting started or expanding on a topic. You can hit this and it will offer up a handful of recommendations with a prompt at the start.
• Visualise - Calibrates the information into more understandable chunks by re-visualising it on the screen, perfect for brain dumps and idea trails.

2. OneNote Unlocks Co-Pilot

Microsoft OneNote has long been one of the better note-taking applications, well it continues to expand with Co-Pilot, with the assistant function on the right hand sidebar.

Within this latest announcement, OneNote offers a way to chat with a ChatGPT option asking it questions like "can you make a to-do list" out of this will expand your content into a task list for your event and much more. This chat like function is converting existing pages and making more sense of them.

Microsoft OneNote

Note-taking and organising app perfect for students, academics and general notes.

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3. Outlook Coaching for Your Emails

Many of us know that Microsoft introduced Co-Pilot into Outlook email drafting which helps to craft and fine tune emails you write in Outlook. This is perfect for refining emails and making them better, but Microsoft have gone a step further with this latest update.

Coaching helps you to become better at managing your drafts of Co-Pilot within the Outlook email application, this will help you revise the tone, teach you how to best use the AI function and reprise messages you're sending. This is something people have compared to Grammarly as a way to produce suggestions and tools.

A very neat and well-constructed idea especially with the world of AI at your fingertips.

4. Powerpoint Upgrades

Microsoft Powerpoint has long been a stale but with the new AI functions you can use DALLE to create images and embed them into your Powerpoint files with ease. This is an expansion of what Microsoft Powerpoint already offers with animations, speaker notes and slide prompts already inside the tool summarised well in this overview.

5. Early Access Program Lands

You can now sign-up for the early access program via Microsoft to help your team get access to Co-Pilot. Read more about it here and how to get access.

Naturally this will be in a beta edition but present a great first way to get your team exposed to using AI and functions that might save your team time or expand the creative bubble of ideas. This will be limited to 600 customers worldwide, so this will likely be filled fast.

Microsoft Loop's Role in Co-Pilot

Curious about Microsoft Loop, the final piece of the Microsoft Co-Pilot puzzle. Here's a little bit more about it expanding on what it does and offers up. Loop was one of the first tools to get Co-Pilot a week after the announcement.