Copilot Pro Brings AI Features to Your Microsoft Office Apps

Microsoft already offers AI-powered Copilot features in Word, Excel, Outlook, and other applications, but they have been restricted to work accounts paying for an added subscription. Now the same functionality is available to everyone with the new Copilot Pro subscription.

Copilot Pro is a new subscription service from Microsoft that adds generative AI features to Microsoft 365 applications and services, and unlocks more features in the Copilot chat interface and Microsoft Designer (Bing Image Creator). It's mostly the functionality that Microsoft announced all the way back in March 2023 and started rolling out to corporate customers late last year. You can ask for draft text in Microsoft Word, or ask questions in Microsoft Excel based on the data in the current spreadsheet. In Microsoft PowerPoint, Copilot can change the formatting and style from typed commands, or create templates for you. The Copilot feature in Outlook can be used to reply to emails or generate new ones.

The main catch right now is that the Copilot Pro subscription isn't powered by Microsoft's Graph technology, which allows the corporate version of Copilot to take data from multiple files and sources in your Microsoft account to create more informed responses. It's not clear if the features that require Graph (such as converting a Word document to a PowerPoint presentation) will ever be available in the consumer version of Copilot, which definitely makes the subscription less enticing.

Besides the Office app features, Copilot Pro also gives you access to the GPT-4 Turbo language model inside Copilot, improvements in Microsoft Designer (also known as Bing Image Creator), and the ability to build your own Copilot GPT with customized instructions and responses.

Copilot Pro costs $20 per month per user, but on its own, you only get access to the Copilot and Microsoft Designer features. The features in Office apps require a regular Microsoft 365 subscription on top of that, which costs $70 per year for one person (or $6.99/mo) or $99.99/yr for a family plan with up to six people (or $9.99/mo).

The main competition here is the ChatGPT Plus subscription from ChatGPT, which has many of the same features: access to GPT-4 Turbo language model, access to plugins, and the ability to make your own GPT. It also has a better mobile app on iPhone and Android than Copilot, and expanded support for creating your own API key for using GPT in your own projects. ChatGPT can't directly edit and parse data in Office apps, though.

You'll be able to sign up for Copilot Pro from Microsoft's website, but the page still says “coming soon” as of the time of writing.