In October 2023, Microsoft launched a major update for its OneDrive cloud storage service, with a new user interface, new AI-based features like a "For You" area that included file recommendations, and more.
At the time, Microsoft also said its Copilot AI assistant would be incorporated into OneDrive. Today, the company confirmed that Copilot will be integrated into OneDrive sometime in mid-April for paid business and education users of its Microsoft 365 service.
In a blog post, Microsoft said OneDrive users will be able to ask questions to Copilot about the files they have stored on their cloud account. The chatbot will then give users the answers to those questions from their stored files without having to try and find that content manually.
In addition to finding the content from your stored files with text prompts, users can also access Copilot to create new content based on those files. That may include asking Copilot to make an FAQ document about a project based on files in OneDrive, or make a draft of a sales pitch, or even create a table using documents stored on the cloud account. Copilot will also be able to create general summaries of documents in OneDrive.
Speaking of which, the company also announced that starting in March 2024, people who use Copilot with a Microsoft 365 license will be able to add Copilot-generated summaries of documents when they share certain files with others. This feature will first work when sharing a Word document from the web and will be added to the desktop and mobile Word apps later in 2024.
Microsoft says Copilot will support the following file types that will be stored on OneDrive accounts:
- Office documents: DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, XLSX
- New Microsoft 365 formats: FLUID, LOOP
- Universal formats: PDF, TXT, RTF
- Web files: ASPX, HTM, HTML
- OpenDocument formats: ODT, ODP
At the moment, the supported languages for Copilot in OneDrive include English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese (Simplified). The company plans to add support for more languages in the near future including Arabic, Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Ukrainian.