How to use Microsoft Copilot: Microsoft’s official AI assistant

Microsoft Copilot is a tool focusing on AI chat assistant scenarios, Microsoft's official AI assistant, GPT-4o driver and integrated Bing real-time search, free to use. This article is based on the official product documentation to sort out its capabilities and suitable usage methods.

Market signals

Microsoft Copilot relies on the natural distribution advantages built into the Windows 11 operating system and Edge browser, with hundreds of millions of monthly active users, making it the main competitor of ChatGPT. Microsoft disclosed in its 2024 financial report that Copilot-related AI services have become an important growth driver for commercial cloud revenue. In the enterprise market, Microsoft 365 Copilot (Enterprise Edition) is used by a large number of Fortune 500 enterprise customers to automate Word document writing, Excel data analysis, and Teams meeting summaries. Consumer-grade Copilot enjoys high satisfaction among non-technical users, who recognize the accuracy of its Internet searches and the simplicity and ease of use of its interface. Compared to ChatGPT, Copilot differentiates itself by providing networked real-time information and DALL-E 3 image generation for free, as well as seamless integration with Microsoft productivity tools.

Product capabilities

• Networked AI dialogue (Bing search integration): Based on GPT-4o dialogue capabilities and Bing real-time search, it can obtain timely information such as the latest news, current stock prices, recent research reports, etc., solving the knowledge cutoff limitations of pure LLM, and all quoted information comes with source links.
• DALL-E 3 image generation: The free version provides a certain number of AI image generation times per day, and the Pro version has more. It supports the generation of high-quality images based on text descriptions. It is currently one of the best quality solutions for free AI image generation.
• Document Analysis and Summary: Supports uploading PDF, Word, Excel and other files. AI reads the file content and performs summary, Q&A and analysis to help users quickly digest long document information.
• Microsoft 365 Deep Integration (Pro): Draft documents with one click in Word, analyze data with natural language in Excel, automatically generate email responses in Outlook, generate summaries and action items in Teams meetings in real time, and embed AI into daily office tool flows.
• Copilot GPTs (custom assistant): Pro users can create custom Copilots for specific tasks and knowledge bases, similar to ChatGPT's GPTs function, for building exclusive AI writing assistants, data analysis assistants, etc.
• Voice Mode: Supports voice input and voice output, achieving a more natural human-machine conversation experience, suitable for hands-free usage scenarios when driving and doing things.

Judgment in one sentence: If your workflow is indeed stuck in the above links, Microsoft Copilot is worthy of being put on the candidate list for small-scale verification first; otherwise, there is no need to introduce it for functionality.