Examine the key components of Copilot for Microsoft 365
Copilot for Microsoft 365 is an AI-powered productivity tool that works alongside popular Microsoft 365 Apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more. Copilot is designed to significantly enhance productivity and efficiency within the Microsoft 365 suite of applications. It can help you solve complex work tasks in one place, work more productively, and amplify human creativity. It is your AI assistant at work that can help you save time and effort by providing suggestions, completing tasks, and automating repetitive work.
Copilot is committed to responsible and secure AI practices. It's designed to ensure that your data is always safe and secure. By using Copilot for Microsoft 365, you can work seamlessly and focus on what matters most - your work.
Key components of Copilot for Microsoft 365
A robust artificial intelligence system comprised of several core components powers Copilot for Microsoft 365. Understanding these key components can provide insight into how Copilot for Microsoft 365 delivers intelligent recommendations and suggestions. These technologies include:
Large language models (LLMs). LLMs represent a class of artificial intelligence models that specialize in understanding and generating human-like text. The "large" in LLM signifies both the size of the models in terms of the number of parameters they encompass, and the vast volume of data on which they're trained. Copilot uses LLMs, such as Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPT) to understand, summarize, predict, and generate content. LLMs, including models like ChatGPT, are a type of generative AI. Instead of merely predicting or classifying, generative AI, like LLMs, can produce entirely new content. When applied to text, LLMs can generate contextually relevant and syntactically correct responses based on the provided prompts.
In the context of Copilot for Microsoft 365, LLMs are the engine that drives Copilot for Microsoft 365's capabilities. Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service privately hosts these models, which Copilot for Microsoft 365 uses to understand user inputs and generate relevant responses. Through the careful application of these models, Copilot for Microsoft 365 helps you navigate your work more effectively, while ensuring privacy and data integrity.
Note
Microsoft 365 keeps your data logically isolated by tenant. This design, together with encryption, ensures privacy while processing and at rest.
Natural language processing (NLP). NLP is the technology behind Copilot for Microsoft 365's ability to read, comprehend, and generate text similar to how humans would. Built on neural networks, NLP allows Copilot for Microsoft 365 to analyze textual content, understand its full context and meaning, and generate natural language suggestions. NLP is a pivotal AI technology that helps machines understand, interpret, and respond to human language in a way that's meaningful. Some of the components involved in NLP include:
- Tokenization. Simplifies complex paragraphs by breaking down text into smaller chunks, like words or phrases.
- Semantic Analysis. Helps Copilot for Microsoft 365 understand the underlying meaning or context.
- Sentiment Analysis. Assess the mood or emotion behind a text, Copilot for Microsoft 365 can understand user intent more accurately.
- Language Translation. Aids in multilingual tasks, allowing Copilot for Microsoft 365 to assist users across different languages.
NLP bridges the gap between human language and machine understanding. It ensures when you ask Copilot for Microsoft 365 something, it understands and responds effectively. On their face, LLMs and NLPs can seem similar. So how do they compare to one another? Natural language processing is all about giving computers abilities like understanding human language, summarizing text, answering questions, and generating written responses. It's a broad field in computer science. Within NLP, researchers use different techniques to give computers these language abilities. One major technique that emerged recently is large language models. LLMs are AI systems trained on massive amounts of text data, which enables them to analyze language and generate remarkably human-like text. LLMs drive major advances in what computers can do with language. NLP refers broadly to the overall goal of language and computers. LLMs offer one powerful approach to building the sophisticated AI models needed to give computers abilities like understanding text, answering questions, writing summaries, and so on. In summary, LLMs are a key tool in the NLP toolbox.
Microsoft 365 apps. Apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and Loop operate with Copilot for Microsoft 365 to support users in the context of their work. For example, Copilot for Microsoft 365 in Word specifically assists users in the process of creating, comprehending, and editing documents. In a similar way, Copilot for Microsoft 365 in the other apps helps users in the context of their work within those apps.
Microsoft Copilot with Graph-grounded chat. Microsoft Copilot with Graph-grounded chat is the chat experience in Copilot for Microsoft 365. It enables users to make use of cross-app intelligence. The conversational chat interface allows Copilot for Microsoft 365 to understand user intent and provide ongoing dialogue. The chat format enhances the context. This feature provides users with a simpler way to work with multiple apps. Users access Microsoft Copilot chat in the same way they would interact using open prompts with ChatGPT or using Copilot on the web. Those prompts are grounded in the LLM and contextualized with the users’ business data and apps. By doing so, Microsoft Copilot surfaces the information and insights into the chat experience that users need from their organization’s data. Prompts work with Copilot for Microsoft 365 across a range of experiences, including Teams (chat), Bing, Microsoft Edge, and the Microsoft 365 app.
Microsoft Syntex. Microsoft Syntex is an optional add-on AI service that Copilot for Microsoft 365 can utilize. Microsoft Syntex uses AI to automate content processing and data categorization. It enables Copilot for Microsoft 365 to extract key information from documents and emails to provide relevant recommendations and suggestions to users as they compose content in apps like Word or Outlook. Syntex uses machine learning models like neural networks that understand documents, forms, images, and so on. The richer the data that Syntex has access to, the more accurate it becomes at processing and categorizing new content.
Microsoft Graph. Microsoft Graph is essentially the connective tissue that binds all your Microsoft 365 services and data together. Copilot for Microsoft 365 applies Microsoft Graph to synthesize and search content from multiple sources within your tenant. The Microsoft Graph API brings more context from user signals into the prompt, such as information from emails, chats, documents, and meetings. This information includes data from services like Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, and more. Microsoft Graph brings this information together so that users don't need to navigate away or switch apps. It enables Copilot for Microsoft 365 to bring the relevant information to you. When doing so, Copilot for Microsoft 365 takes into account Microsoft 365 user permissions, data security, and compliance policies. It only generates responses based on the information the user has permission to access.
Important
Prompts, responses, and data accessed through Microsoft Graph aren't used to train foundation LLMs, including those used by Copilot for Microsoft 365.
Copilot for Microsoft 365 connects all these elements together, along with the foundation LLM, AI platform, skills repository, and runtime. Together, this design provides Microsoft's common underlying AI stack, which powers user experiences for Bing chat, Microsoft 365 apps, and cross-app intelligence.
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