Microsoft's new Copilot Pro provides consumers with AI-powered Office features

Microsoft first launched its AI-powered Office features for businesses in November, but just two months later, the company has already begun offering them to consumers. Copilot Pro launches today as a $20 monthly subscription that provides access to AI-powered features within Office applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as well as priority access to the latest OpenAI models and the ability to create your own Copilot GPT.

If you're already subscribed to Microsoft 365 Personal or Home, an additional subscription of $20 per month (per person) will instantly unlock Copilot in Office apps on Mac, Windows, and iPad. These features include the ability to create entire PowerPoint slide decks from a chatbot-like prompt, and Copilot's built-in Word experiences for paraphrasing, creating text, and summarizing documents. The co-pilot will also appear Outlook.com To help you respond to emails or compose new messages, a preview version of Excel is available for analyzing data, creating graphs, and more.

Most of the features that have been available to businesses over the past couple of months will be available to consumers, with the big exception being the ability to call up Copilot to create a PowerPoint deck based on a Word document. Since the consumer version is not powered by Microsoft's Graph technology, this functionality is not yet available.

In addition to Office integration, Copilot Pro also includes access to the latest OpenAI models, improvements to Designer's Image Creator (formerly Bing Image Creator), and the ability to create your own Copilot GPT.

If you're not a Microsoft 365 subscriber, you can subscribe to Copilot Pro only to get priority access to GPT-4 Turbo within Copilot. You'll get faster performance during peak times and will be able to switch between models sooner. Image creation using OpenAI's DALL-E models will also be improved with a new landscape image format and improved image quality with Copilot Pro. The subscription will also soon include the new Copilot GPT Builder software that lets you create a custom Copilot GPT – similar to the version launched for businesses last year.

Microsoft is targeting the new Copilot Pro subscription for premium Copilot users, in the same way that OpenAI offers its own ChatGPT subscription with priority access and the latest models. “There's a lot of demand from these power users, and they want faster access to the latest models, they want faster performance, and they want creativity tools,” Divya Kumar, global head of search and AI marketing at Microsoft, says in an article. Discuss with the edge.

These Copilot Pro features will likely be tempting for power users, but you'll also need to subscribe to Microsoft 365 Personal or Family to get any Office-related Copilot features across the web and in the Office apps. All of these Copilot Pro features will also be available on the web, in Windows or Mac apps, and on mobile. There are also more Copilot Pro features on the way, just like how Microsoft has been constantly improving Copilot (formerly Bing Chat) over the past year.

“Given this pattern that we've been following, you would expect that we would do exactly the same thing with Copilot Pro,” Kumar says, using a metaphor for the AI ​​bombardment we've seen from Microsoft in recent months. . “It already comes with a lot of features and functionality on top of Copilot… We want to continue to offer premium additional value and we'll start doing that very quickly as well.”

Microsoft is also opening its Copilot offering for Microsoft 365 to more businesses today. This launched with a minimum of 300 seats for larger enterprise users last year, but Microsoft is removing that limitation and allowing most business customers to sign up for a $30 per user per month subscription today. You can read more about that here.