Microsoft 365 Copilot Infuses Generative AI Into Every Office App

I have never used it this way as yet, but useful it would seem.  Clippy, mentioned below, I do remember using. 

Microsoft 365 Copilot Infuses Generative AI Into Every Office App

ERIC HAL SCHWARTZ on March 16, 2023 in Voicebot.ai

Microsoft has unleashed a flood of new generative AI features called Microsoft 365 Copilot for its suite of productivity software. Copilot encompasses AI assistance for all of the applications, including Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams.

MICROSOFT 365 COPILOT  

Microsoft 365 Copilot, which shares just a name with the GitHub coding assistant, is designed to help users produce and organize content, including documents, emails, and presentations. The AI’s integration with Microsoft’s services allows it to turn raw data into Excel graphs, design and animate a PowerPoint presentation, and translate a meeting transcription into a long-term strategic plan for a company. The natural language prompts only require a vague description of the user’s goal and a connection to the relevant documents or meeting transcriptions to gather the data, as seen in the PowerPoint example at the top.

The obvious analogy is Microsoft Clippy, the old animated paperclip that would guess what a user was trying to do and link them to a guide on how to do it. Copilot doesn’t just point at a map, though. It hops in the car and drives you to your destination, then walks you through how it got there. You can see an example of how Copilot operates in Excel here.  ... ' 

Clippy and Teams

Been using MS Teams, like it.    But with such systems the question ultimately arises, should we have a system that tracks our activity and offers to help,  assists, or even nag-nudges us to better results?
Used Clippy when it was first implemented in the late 90s.  It was useful, clever, perhaps a bit over played.  There was a howl of ridicule, joking and derision, ..... that was also much overdone.   It could have been fixed,  but MS bagged it too quickly.  Someone should have the courage to take on the challenge of a helpful but strong online assistant.  Its apparently not Microsoft.

Microsoft revived and killed Clippy in a single day
The office assistant briefly popped up in Microsoft Teams.  By Christine Fisher, @cfisherwrites in Engadget

The dream of the '90s was alive in Microsoft Teams this week when Microsoft's old office assistant, Clippy, showed up. If you used Microsoft Office between 1997 and 2001, you likely remember Clippy as the animated paperclip that popped up and offered tips for using the software. Microsoft did away with Clippy in 2001, so people were surprised to see Clippy stickers appear in Microsoft Teams this week. And they were even more surprised when, just a day later, Microsoft offed the little guy again.... "