Two months after launching its AI-powered Office features for enterprises in November, Microsoft is now making them available to consumers. Today marks the debut of Copilot Pro, a $20 monthly membership that gives you priority access to the most recent OpenAI models, the opportunity to create your own Copilot GPT, and access to AI-powered features inside Office applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
If you currently have Microsoft 365 Personal or Home, you may use Copilot in Office apps on Mac, Windows, and iPad right away with the additional $20 monthly subscription (per person). These capabilities include the capacity to create whole PowerPoint slide decks in response to a query akin to a chatbot and the ability to utilize inline Copilot experiences in Word for text generation, paragraph rephrasing, and document summarization. A preview of Copilot may be found in Excel, where it can be used to analyze data, create graphs, and much more. It will also be available on Outlook.com to assist you in responding to emails or creating new ones.
With the notable exception of being able to command Copilot to create a PowerPoint slide based on a Word document, the majority of the features that have been available to corporations for the previous several months will be available to consumers. This functionality isn’t accessible yet because the consumer version doesn’t leverage Microsoft’s Graph technology.
In addition to Office integration, Copilot Pro offers the ability to create your own Copilot GPT, access to the most recent OpenAI models, and enhancements to the Image Creator from Designer (formerly Bing Image Creator).
To gain priority access to GPT-4 Turbo within Copilot, if you do not currently have a Microsoft 365 subscription, you can purchase a Copilot Pro subscription alone. Faster performance during peak hours and the ability to switch between models will be available soon. A new landscape image format and enhanced image quality with Copilot Pro will also be added to the image creation process with OpenAI’s DALL-E models. Soon, the membership will also come with a new Copilot GPT Builder that will allow you to design a personalized Copilot GPT, much like the version that was introduced for companies last year.
Similar to how OpenAI provides its own ChatGPT membership with priority access and the newest models, Microsoft is targeting its new Copilot Pro subscription at its Copilot power users. Speaking with The Verge, Microsoft’s global head of marketing for search and AI, Divya Kumar, states that “those power users have a lot of demand and they want more rapid access to the latest models, faster performance, and creativity tools.”
Power users will probably find these Copilot Pro features alluring, but in order to access any of the Office-related Copilot features on the web or in Office apps, you must also have a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription. Additionally, all of these Copilot Pro features will be accessible via mobile, Windows or Mac apps, and the web. Additional Copilot Pro capabilities are also in the works, following the same pattern as Microsoft’s continuous enhancement of Copilot (formerly known as Bing Chat) over the previous year.
“You can expect we’re going to do the exact same thing for Copilot Pro given that pattern we’ve been in, that rolling thunder,” Kumar says, alluding to Microsoft’s recent barrage of AI announcements. “On top of Copilot, it already comes with a ton of features and functionality. We want to keep adding premium value, and we’re going to start doing that very soon.”
Additionally, Microsoft is now making its Copilot for Microsoft 365 service available to additional companies. Last year, Microsoft introduced a 300-seat minimum for bigger commercial users. However, as of Monday, the majority of Microsoft’s business clients can sign up for a $30 monthly subscription per user. More information about that is available here.
