ChatGPT has it, so we should have expected it. Microsoft has a Copilot Pro subscription in the works, which will give you more AI options within the Office programs. Think of Excel, PowerPoint and Word, for example.
Copilot for Office
Copilot’s Office options are not new: companies have been able to open them to their employees since November, but now Copilot is being made more widely available to consumers. It’s just not free. You need a subscription that costs $20 in the United States. As a consumer, you can now use Copilot for free if you have the app: you can ask the AI ​​chatbot questions, but also have images generated. So you can do a lot with it in itself.
But suppose that as a consumer you also like to use Copilot within Office, then you now have access to it in the form of that new Pro subscription. This gives you priority for quick answers, higher quality images and access to the latest AI models. And especially within Excel and the Office programs, because you currently already have free access to the very well-functioning GPT-4 Turbo if you use the Copilot app. However, it may be that that subscription means that the Copilot app is no longer available for free, or only very basic. That is still unclear.
Create your own chatbot
In any case, you can use it to build your own Copilot-GPT and that is interesting, because it allows you to create your own chatbot for a very specific purpose. For example, if you run a website about the island of Terschelling as a hobby, you can use Copilot Pro to create your own chatbot that is mainly Terschelling-oriented. It’s a bit like ChatGPT’s store, where people can offer their self-built creations, but on a smaller scale.
At least it’s cheaper than the competition (although, they’re more friends than competitors): ChatGPT Plus costs $24 per month. The Microsoft subscription offers the option to, for example, put together an entire presentation in PowerPoint based on one prompt. The same applies to texts in Word and help with formulas in Excel. Also useful: within Outlook it can help you reply to e-mails and neatly tell your colleagues what you want/have done.
Create PowerPoints quickly
There is also something that is possible on the existing business subscription and not on the consumer one: using a Word document to base a PowerPoint deck on. But hey, if you cut and paste your prompt a bit cleverly, you can still get it done. It’s no joke that this doesn’t work: it’s because the consumer version doesn’t work based on Microsoft Graph.
The advantage is that the subscription not only works on the Office apps, but also on the web versions, which are commonly used. In any case, it should make your working day considerably more pleasant, because Copilot can do all kinds of things for you that speed up your work. It may take a little time to get used to it, not just writing good prompts, but also the fact that it’s there and ready to help you, but once you get the hang of what it can do, it gives you a good right hand. Not for the end result, but especially for the basics. Handy when a presentation is already half-finished and you only need to cross the i’s and cross the t’s. But as a ‘normal’ user outside a business account, you do need some money for this: 240 dollars per year (220 euros).
