Microsoft has offered up its latest monthly update for its Copilot generative AI service in its Microsoft 365 productivity subscription service, this time for the month of April 2024.
However, Microsoft"s blog post for the April 2024 update includes a feature that won"t be available until sometime in May. It will add a new function for the Outlook email client:
Starting in May, you can use Copilot in Outlook to connect to and reason across your enterprise data including your chats, documents, meetings, and emails. You will find the Copilot app in the left app bar in classic Microsoft Outlook for Windows, new Outlook for Windows, and Outlook on the web.
Microsoft will also add another related feature in May. It will add a way to let Copilot answers to your questions be grounded based on your locally stored files.
Word users in Microsoft 365 can now chat with Copilot in the app with answers provided by the Microsoft cloud and Microsoft Graph data, Copilot in Word also has added a Rewrite feature to help make text documents better and it can now create summaries of selected portions of a Word file.
Other related new features include adding commercial data protection for people who use the Copilot mobile app for Android and iOS, If you use Copilot in Excel, you can access a feature that lets it create multiple formula columns from just one text prompt.
Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that Copilot for Microsoft 365 now supports the use of 16 additional languages, with more to be added in the near future. In May, the company plans to add support for Copilot for Microsoft 365 for its higher education customers. Schools with students younger than 18 years old will be able to access a private preview of Copilot sometime in the spring of 2024.