What you need to know
- Copilot is getting a major update with a new user interface and capabilities.
- The new interface is designed to be "warm and inviting" with an immersive chat experience.
- Copilot will read you the news every morning, and can even browse the web alongside you.
- The new Copilot is available today on Windows, the web, iOS, and Android.
Microsoft has unveiled a major update for Copilot that launches today. The update is designed to make Copilot more human and interactive. It features a brand-new user interface that’s calmer and more intuitive, along with new features and capabilities that Microsoft hopes will elevate Copilot above being just another AI tool—it’s an AI friend, too.
The new Copilot starts at the UI, which has been completely rebuilt from the ground up with a new card-like interface that’s more stylistic and inviting. It’s very different from other Microsoft products before it, with a mixed use of fonts and less rigid stylization across the interface. The company describes the new UI as more intuitive, digestible, speedy, and fluent, with a warm tone and distinct style. It’s supposed to be more human.
“I truly believe we can create a calmer, more helpful and supportive era of technology, quite unlike anything we’ve seen before,” says CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman in a letter accompanying the news. “Copilot will be there for you, in your corner, by your side, and always strongly aligned with your interests. It understands the context of your life while safeguarding your privacy, data, and security, remembering the details that are most helpful in any situation. It gives you access to a universe of knowledge, simplifying, and decluttering the daily barrage of information, and offering support and encouragement when you want it.”
Microsoft really wants you to view the new Copilot as more than just an AI tool. It wants to you to treat it like a friend, whether that be by asking it for advice on how to ask out a crush, venting about work, or chatting about nothing because that’s what people do. Suleyman says “It’ll adapt to your mannerisms and develop capabilities built around your preferences and needs. We are not creating a static tool so much as establishing a dynamic, emergent, and evolving interaction. It will provide you with unwavering support to help you show up the way you really want in your everyday life, a new means of facilitating human connections and accomplishments alike.”
The new Copilot comes with a handful of new features, starting with “Copilot Voice,” a new, more natural way of interacting with Copilot. Just like GPT-4o, Copilot Voice lets you have a natural back and forth with Microsoft’s assistant, using voice to communicate like you’re chatting with a friend. Copilot will umm and ahh like a real person does, and can handle interruptions and topic changes on the fly.
The new Copilot features a number of different natural voices that you can choose from, all of which sound distinctly human with a subtle robotic filter over the top. The voice will also be what you hear when interacting with the new “Copilot Daily” feature, which will provide an overview of today’s news, weather, reminders, and more.
Copilot Daily plays like a podcast, letting you skip backwards and forwards between the different topics that have been curated for you that day. You can listen to the entire thing in chronological order, or skip directly to the topics that you’re most interested in. Microsoft says Copilot Daily will pull in stories and content from publishers such as Reuters, Financial Times, and more.
There’s also a new “Personalized Discover” feature that intelligently suggests conversation starters and other capabilities that Copilot can do contextually. Copilot will factor in your behavior across different Microsoft services and Copilot conversations to generate suggestions. In the future, this may even extend to the websites you visit in Edge.
Alongside the above new features, Microsoft is launching two new experimental ones that are designed to make Copilot more productively useful to you. The first is Copilot Vision, a feature coming to Edge that will let Copilot browse the web alongside you, looking at the same webpages you do and partaking in a real-time conversation to help with suggestions, navigation, ideas, and more.
For example, with Copilot Vision, you can be shopping around for a new pair of shoes, and ask Copilot for advice using your voice. You can tell it you’re looking for red high-top shoes, and Copilot will be able to look at the website you’re on, suggest where to click to find what you’re looking for, and what it thinks about the shoes you may have ultimately picked.
You can even use it just to chat to when reading the news or social media. You could ask it for advice around how to respond to a message, or vent about how a particular headline has made you feel angry. Microsoft is clear that Copilot Vision is an entirely opt-in experience, enabled only when you configure it to be, and all the data it processes is handled on-device and not sent to Microsoft.
Copilot Vision doesn’t work on paywalled websites, and during the initial preview, is only available on a select number of websites. The company intends to open this up to more sites over time.
The second experimental feature coming to the new Copilot is a feature called Think Deeper, which is designed to help Copilot be more useful when it comes to complex questions and queries. When using Think Deeper mode, Copilot will take longer to respond, with answers being more fledged out and technical, complex, or in-depth.
Both Copilot Vision and Think Deeper are experimental, launching as part of a new test program within Copilot called “Copilot Labs.” Copilot Labs is where Microsoft intends to incubate new AI features for Copilot that it wants to test but isn’t yet deeming ready for full deployment. Copilot Labs is exclusive to Copilot Pro subscribers, so free users won’t be able to try out any of these experimental users.
The new Copilot is available today on Windows, iOS, Android, and the web. It’s rolling out in waves, so you may not see it right away, but you should very soon. The company has also announced a wave of new AI experiences coming to Copilot+ PCs this fall, including a new Click To Do AI overlay and AI in Windows Search.
