What Is Microsoft Copilot? Microsoft’s Powerful New Chatbot, Explained

We’ve come a long way since Eliza and SmarterChild. Far from being a one-trick pony, today’s chatbots like ChatGPT and Copilot are powerful, versatile tools for content creation and research. If you’ve been anywhere near a Windows PC of late, you’ve probably seen icons for Copilot in your web browser, or even slipped onto your taskbar after a recent Windows update. What is Copilot, and what can it do? How does it work? How can you access it? Read on to find out.

“Microsoft Copilot” is a collective shorthand for a group of AI-powered productivity apps and services offered by Microsoft. Right now, there are several versions of Copilot, including a coding assistant called GitHub Copilot (the OG), standalone Copilot apps available to mobile and PC users, Microsoft 365 Copilot (formerly known as Microsoft Office), and a lightweight cloud-based Copilot accessible from a web browser. Microsoft also offers a version of Copilot purpose-built for “daily operations in security and IT.”

How Does Copilot Work?

The whole crowd of Copilots are AI chatbots with a natural language interface that can parse a variety of media, including text, images, audio, and video. You interact with Copilot by having a conversation with it. Ask a question or input a prompt, and the chatbot will respond by generating content in the medium or format you specify.

Copilot is based on the Microsoft Prometheus large language model (LLM). According to Microsoft, Prometheus uses a software component called the Orchestrator to combine the Bing search index and results with OpenAI’s GPT-4+, GPT-4 Turbo, and GPT-4o foundational LLMs, which have been fine-tuned using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.

Like all the generative AI chatbots in its class (Gemma/Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, et al), Copilot depends on its ability to remix known content into a novel form. This unique ability is called hallucination, and it is a generative AI’s key strength—and its key weakness.

In addition to Prometheus, Copilot is based on OpenAI’s family of GPT-3.5/4/4.5 models: the same foundational LLMs that power ChatGPT. Copilot also uses OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 model for image creation. The backend/cloud servers run on Microsoft’s Azure supercomputer.

Copilot vs. Copilot+ PCs

Copilot (with no plus sign) is a generative AI tool you can use via Android and iOS apps, Office apps, a web browser (including a miniature Copilot chatbot that runs in the Edge browser’s sidebar), and a desktop app for Windows.

Copilot+, on the other hand, is an adjective: It describes a class of PCs with neural processing units (NPUs) that enable them to perform AI tasks locally rather than outsourcing work to servers in the cloud. (Think: “Type AB+” or “Y2K ready. “) All Copilot+ PCs have to meet certain hardware requirements specified by Microsoft, including 16GB or more of RAM and an NPU capable of 40 TOPS or more.

Note: In this article, we’ll shorthand this jargon and simply use “Copilot” to describe the core capabilities shared by all Copilots, unless we specify otherwise: e.g., Copilot Pro or Copilot 365.

Generally speaking, Copilot operates on a freemium model: Most basic features are available to everyone for free, and higher-level tools are gated behind a paid subscription.

There are at least five paid service models, but Copilot’s simplest paid service tier is called Microsoft Copilot Pro, and it costs $20 per month. According to Microsoft, this version of Copilot provides priority access to the newest models (currently GPT-4 Turbo), even—and perhaps especially—during peak usage periods.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is $30/month for business/enterprise customers. Its chief value add is its ability to work with Microsoft’s Office suite for text generation, copyediting, data parsing and analysis, and creating PowerPoints (no, we will never be free of PowerPoints).

Bells and Whistles

Several default chatbots are available in Copilot, starting with the standard Copilot chatbot and one for Microsoft Designer, which employs its Image Creator (formerly known as Bing Image Creator) to generate images based on text prompts. Other purpose-built chatbots include a travel planner, a cooking assistant, and a fitness trainer. All of the bots respond to natural-language prompts, but you can also analyze images, paste a block of text, or direct the Edge sidebar version to explain the gist of a web article.

Copilot+ PCs can access additional features, including a variety of creative tools to generate, edit, and upscale images; studio effects and filters for video content creators and webcam streams; and audio subtitles and translation on the fly. Cocreator, a collaborative image-creation tool baked into the updated Paint app, lets you work with the AI to produce an image in response to a prompt or a rough sketch in the canvas, providing as much or as little direction as you like.

Copilot Voice allows users to engage with Copilot in real-time voice conversations. The feature utilizes OpenAI’s GPT-4o model (o for “omni”), which can parse and generate audio.

In October 2024, Microsoft unveiled an early-access program for features still in development, dubbed Copilot Labs. Features currently available through this program include Think Deeper, which uses OpenAI’s o1 models to let Copilot “reason” through more complex logic to respond to queries, and Copilot Vision, which lets Copilot view and discuss websites as you browse them. Originally, Think Deeper and Copilot Voice were exclusively available to Pro subscribers, but as of February 2025, both tools are available for free to all Copilot users.

Copilot currently supports plug-ins for Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, OpenTable, Shop from Shopify, and Suno AI.

Copilot Pro also includes access to the Copilot GPT Builder, which lets users create custom Copilot chatbots, as well as features inside Copilot Labs, an early-access program for in-development features. The Pro subscription also allows for higher resolution in images generated by Microsoft Designer’s Image Creator.

How to Get Started With Microsoft Copilot

For a PC or laptop, the easiest way to start using Copilot is its web interface. Anyone can use the browser-based Copilot, and you can get to it two ways. In a web browser of your choice, you can navigate to copilot.microsoft.com, where you’ll be presented with a place to enter your query and some one-click ideas to try out if you don’t know where to start.

If you have Edge installed, you can just open a new browser tab. To get started, click on the Copilot icon toward the top right.

Interacting with Copilot is simple. You can talk to the chatbot in regular conversational language using voice or text. Because of its gigantic training dataset and its ability to surf the web, it can speak to a wide variety of topics. It’s a bit like talking to C-3PO.

PC users can get Copilot through the Microsoft store. For mobile users, standalone Microsoft Copilot apps are available for Android and iOS. You can also access Copilot through the WhatsApp and Telegram apps by adding the bot’s phone number (+1 877-224-1042) to the app’s contacts.

Final Thoughts

Copilot is a set of highly productivity-oriented tools with a wide range of applications for personal and business use. There are paid tiers, but most of Copilot’s core features are available for free.

We’ve found Copilot to be a capable research assistant because it explains its process and provides its sources. It’s great for copyediting and sanity-checking a block of text. Copilot’s summaries are fairly accurate, and it even has some ability to parse colloquial language and idiom. It can absolutely write the whole of an article or blog post or email, but in a way, using it like that misses the great strength of AI chatbots like this one. It can help you work through a logical problem, wrangle equations, or check your understanding of a web article.

However, like all such AI chatbots, Copilot is vulnerable to leading questions and hallucinations. Grammar matters. It forces you to think about what you want, which is actually a lot of fun if you let it be.

And if you’ve stuck with us this long without lapsing into glassy-eyed scrolling after the word “Copilot” lost all meaning—you’re doing better than we did, and we salute you.