Artificial-intelligence aide handles email, meetings and other things, but its price and limited use have some skeptical
Microsoft’s new artificial-intelligence assistant for its bestselling software has been in the hands of testers for more than six months and their reviews are in: useful, but often doesn’t live up to its price.
The company is hoping for one of its biggest hits in decades with Copilot for Microsoft 365, an AI upgrade that plugs into Word, Outlook and Teams. It uses the same technology as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and can summarize emails, generate text and create documents based on natural language prompts.
Companies involved in testing say their employees have been clamoring to test the tool—at least initially. So far, the shortcomings with software including Excel and PowerPoint and its tendency to make mistakes have given some testers pause about whether, at $30 a head per month, it is worth the price
LLMs feel like an evolution of search engines (or a devolution in some ways), but apart from that, it’s really just been a novelty. Maybe if I was in a creative field that needed to generate crap-tons of text on a regular basis, it would be a nice to have (before inevitably losing my job when the higher-ups realize how to get my job done). Otherwise, I struggle to even figure out what to do with it. Any answers it gives are sub-par and only surface level ideas that I could think up in 5 minutes OR they’re so heavily censored now as to be worthless. There’s some storytelling/worldbuilding potential with respect to RPGs, but you’re holding its hand so much that you’d just as well write your own material
The image generation is interesting, but mostly seems like a replacement for stock images/photography, but again, because of how it censors or misunderstands you so much, it really limits its potential.