Copilot Pro is Microsoft’s AI vision. It offers improved image creation tools and AI capabilities in Office applications.
Microsoft’s Copilot Pro premiered last month with a twenty-dollar-per-month fee. It grants users immediate access to the most recent OpenAI models, enhanced image production, and AI-powered functionality within certain Office products.
Over the past month, I’ve evaluated Copilot Pro to see how valid the $20 membership is for my everyday needs and how well the AI text and image production works in Office programs like Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. While several Copilot Pro options are genuinely helpful enhancements that I’m still determining if I want to go without, others could be better.
Let’s examine everything that Copilot Pro currently offers.
- Designer Image Creation
- Copilot in Word, PowerPoint, Excel
Designer image creation
A significant benefit of Copilot Pro is access to an enhanced version of Designer, Microsoft’s program for creating images. Content is generated by the Designer using OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 model. Widescreen photos are produced with more detail in the Copilot Pro edition, which is better than the free version.
I’ve been experimenting with photographs using Designer, and it looks perfect if you give it as much information as possible. You can get some good examples when you ask the Designer to create “a picture of a dog resting by a window looking at a piece of bacon,” but with a little more prompting, you can get much more. Using more detailed wording to create a hyper-real painting with natural light, moderate shots, and a profound grade of the field will be far better.
The two images below demonstrate how the Designer correctly uses natural lighting and adds a wide field surrounding the bacon. Sadly, several bacon slices are present rather than just one, and they’re large, too.
As with most AI-related features, the Designer function isn’t flawless. I created an additional picture of a dog gazing at bacon and added a massive piece of bacon at random. Only a couple of the four generated photos are usable. Text remains a challenge for DALL-E 3, too, especially when you request the Designer to put labels or signs with text.
The illustration of a 1910 UPS delivery man was done quite well. Even though the UPS logo is a little off, it’s still in the vein of vintage Japanese animation. You can create 100 photos daily with Copilot Pro. It does it far more quickly than the free edition.
Copilot in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook
However, Copilot Pro is more than just an image generator. With this subscription, Office apps’ AI features become accessible. You may utilize Word’s Copilot feature to produce text, which is useful when you want to improve paragraphs or set up a framework for a work.
You can also use Copilot to display numerical data as a table or graph, which is especially helpful for making documents with a lot of text easy to understand. When you highlight text, a tiny version of the Copilot logo shows up to encourage you to pick it so you may edit or analyze the text. When you choose a whole paragraph, Copilot will attempt to modify it using multiple options that you can select and go through.
Similar to generating images, altering paragraphs can be chaotic in introducing new meanings by changing out terms. I could have written much more. It is far more beneficial for someone who only writes occasionally.
For me, Copilot in Outlook has been incredibly helpful. Email summaries are conveniently displayed at the top of emails; I use them daily to review them. I could even be motivated to purchase Copilot Pro exclusively for this feature since it saves me a lot of time preparing a project with numerous people.
Getting a brief synopsis of all the essential details in an email thread that has been going on for a while is also beneficial. Copilot in Outlook can also be used to compose emails and draft responses. Like Word, you can write a draft email using this rewrite tool, which will analyze it and provide suggestions for making it more transparent or have a better tone.
Even more helpful if you’re not conditioned to doing presentations with PowerPoint is Copilot. Upon request, it may produce slides in a particular style, and you will have a complete deck back in seconds. This feature includes a designer that lets you go into each slide and change the text or pictures.
I could improve my presentations to use this in the future. It is undoubtedly outstanding to the Internet PowerPoint templates. However, I needed help with PowerPoint presentation development. Especially when Copilot would respond, “I’m still working on it,” without completing the slide generation.
The most constrained aspect of the Copilot Pro is currently the Copilot in Excel. Your data must be placed in a table properly. Copilot is going to convert it if it doesn’t. Once your data is compatible with Copilot, you may use it to make pivot tables, generate visualizations, or even receive formula recommendations. Since Copilot for Excel is currently being reviewed, I anticipate seeing many more features added in the future.
OneNote is the last Office app to showcase Copilot. Like Word, you may quickly rewrite text and make notes or plans here. Additionally, Copilot provides note summaries, which may be entertaining, especially when you try to summarise notes that are fragmentary or written in shorthand and only make sense in your head.
Copilot GPTs Future
Microsoft plans to release other GPTs related to cuisine, tourism, and fitness. These personal assistants within Copilot can assist you with recipe discovery, travel planning, and customized training regimen creation. Soon, Copilot Pro customers can also create unique GPTs centered on particular subjects.
Copilot Pro is a decent beginning for Microsoft’s consumer AI initiatives, but I wonder if I’d pay twenty dollars monthly. These are good improvements to image production; certain people could be valued at $20 a month.
Outlook’s email summaries encourage me to subscribe, but the Office programs’ text-generating features could be more remarkable. You can achieve similarly excellent outcomes using ChatGPT or the free trial of Copilot. Still, you’ll have to manually copy and paste the data into a paper, which is a less expensive choice.
Since the end-user Copilot Pro is less advanced than the commercial version, I anticipate several updates in the upcoming months. Microsoft is putting a lot of effort into artificial intelligence. The corporation will further describe more AI initiatives at Build in May.
