Mick Vleeshouwer

Given that they are now for sale, here are brief reviews of the Microsoft Copilot Pro Apps I have tried: Outlook: This is the slickest of the Copilots in terms of deep integration into the core application, and in many ways is the most obvious use case. It basically lets GPT-4 answer and summarize your emails. It does a nice job drafting email replies (though watch out for hallucinations), but I just wish it handled appointments and scheduling. Word: Friendlier (but less powerful) way to get ChatGPT-4 to do writing for you. This may end up being the big hit of the Pro apps, since a lot of people seem to not realize the power of GPT-4 as a writing tool, and Word makes it obvious. If you are a ChatGPT-4 power user, you will probably turn to that, instead, but it works quite well. PowerPoint: Technically, the most impressive Copilot is the one in PowerPoint: the ability to create a fully illustrated draft presentation directly from a document (with speaker notes!), though the presentations are not that exciting. How and when people use it will be fascinating. I wonder whether the ease of creating solid presentations will make PowerPoint more common, or break its hold over offices everwhere. Excel: It doesn't do much right now, and has many limitations. That is especially disappointing as Excel supports Python, and GPT-4 does Python and data stuff really well. Lots of potential to change the nature of spreadsheets, but no real use case today. OneNote: I have played with this least, so have little to say. All-in-all, it is a pretty impressive set of tools, especially if you are not a GPT-4 power user. It is also clear that the easy UXs built into everyone's most used office tools will make AI generated content ubiquitous, for better or worse.

Big new AI thing: Microsoft Bing (which uses GPT-4 in Creative Mode), accepts images as input. The results are impressive. I fed it a meme, it could understand context & read text! A new dimension of AI use just opened up. So expect a flood of AI Twitter influencer threads...