We have collected questions from attendees of our Copilot webinar sessions, and here are the answers from the presenter Neil du Plessis:

1. Question: My observation is that Copilot understands spoken Finnish in Teams Meetings really nicely! I can ask questions in English with Copilot and responses are returned in English, but Copilot is well-grounded to our Finnish conversation in the meeting. For which languages does intelligent recap work currently? Is there any overview available?

Answer: Copilot for Microsoft 365 will be supported in the following languages: English (US, GB, AU, CA, IN), Spanish (Spain, Mexico), Japanese, French (France, Canada), German, Portuguese (Brazil), Italian, Chinese Simplified. Coverage will soon be extended to additional languages – Arabic, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Ukrainian.

2. Question: How well does intelligent recap work in on-site meetings, instead of Teams meetings?

Answer: Copilot makes use of the M365 apps and as long as on-site meetings make use of an M365 app like Teams, say for recordings, it will be effective. Recap will work for on-site meetings if the meeting was recorded using Teams. However, it won’t be able to distinguish between different speakers unless you have Teams Rooms equipment in the room.

3. Question: Is it possible to create our own AI models with let’s say PDF files? For example, I want to build a model that help me with fire safety regulations in construction matters.

Answer: Copilot understands PDF files, so you can reference PDF files stored in SharePoint as part of your prompts. You can also open a PDF in Edge and use the Copilot sidebar to analyze a single PDF document. Lastly, you can certainly build your own GPT trained on your PDF library using Copilot studio and integrate that into Copilot for Microsoft 365. Several options, all will work.

4. Question: What is the link of the Copilot lab mentioned in the slides?

Answer: https://copilot.cloud.microsoft/en-US/prompts 

5. Question: Can Co Pilot adjust to my “style/my wording” that I usually use?

Answer: Yes. When you reference a file you can ask Copilot to use the same style of language used in the referenced document.

6. Question: How well does intelligent recap works in on-site meetings, instead of Teams meetings?

Answer: As long as you use Teams to record the meeting, Copilot will be able to provide the recap. However, if you want speaker attribution you will have to be using a Teams Rooms-equipped meeting room.

7. Question: These are really great marketing measures from Microsoft. So far, Microsoft Copilot has been very sobering. When will the functions shown in the video really be available?

Answer: Microsoft indicated that they are working hard at establishing parity between the demonstrations and the current release of Copilot. Also, we have seen over the last three months since launch significant improvement in the more nuanced capabilities.

8. Question: Will Microsoft also for Copilot bring up the so-called “GPT” Function, where you will be able to “adapt your personal chatgpt” for your usage – like Chat GPT already offers to create your own GPT Variant with Settings, to fine-tune it. Is there a release date for it?

Answer: This has not been announced as a capability of Copilot for Microsoft 365. However, using Copilot Studio, you can certainly create your own GPT just like what OpenAI offers.

9. Question: In my work environment, How can I check which Copilot version I have access to?

Answer: If you have Copilot at all in your work environment, it will be Copilot for Microsoft 365. This is the case if you have the underlying Microsoft 365 E3, E5, or Business license. You can check by going to https://portal.office.com/account/. Look under “subscriptions”.

10. Question: Is Copilot currently – a “Interface” connected to the trained model from ChatGPT 3.5, or 4.0? I guess 3.5 is in the free version, and 4.0 is the paid version of Copilot?

Answer: Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 is built using technology from OpenAI, other large language models (LLMs), and Microsoft resources. It combines the power of these models with your data in the Microsoft Graph (including your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and more) and the Microsoft 365 apps. However, Microsoft does not specify the exact version of ChatGPT used in Microsoft Copilot. Please note that Microsoft Copilot is not the same as ChatGPT, even though they share some functionalities. They are different tools serving unique use cases.

11. Question: Is there already a release date for Co-Pilot Windows Integration in Europe? I know it’s a data security regulation issue here.

Answer: Copilot for Microsoft 365 is currently available globally for qualifying customers licensed with the supported underlying licenses. However, although Copilot is available in all geographic regions, it requires the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, which is available only in North America and Europe. Please note that Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 upholds residency commitments as outlined in the Microsoft Product Terms and Data Protection Addendum. Later this year, Copilot for Microsoft 365 will be added as a covered workload under the data residency commitments in Microsoft Product Terms and the Microsoft Advanced Data Residency (ADR) and Multi-Geo Capabilities add-ons.

12. Question: Are Copilot-Instances region-bound, similar to Azure? E.g., US-West, EU-Central, etc.?

Answer: Copilot for Microsoft 365 is currently available globally for qualifying customers licensed with the supported underlying licenses. However, although Copilot is available in all geographic regions, it requires the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, which is available only in North America and Europe. Please note that Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 upholds residency commitments as outlined in the Microsoft Product Terms and Data Protection Addendum. Later this year, Copilot for Microsoft 365 will be added as a covered workload under the data residency commitments in Microsoft Product Terms and the Microsoft Advanced Data Residency (ADR) and Multi-Geo Capabilities add-ons.

13. Question: Can Co-pilot help with establishing a company-wide data-classification if it doesn’t exist yet?

Answer: This is not a Copilot function at the moment. However, Microsoft Purview has several AI-powered features to do exactly that. They would include trainable AI classifiers, automatic labeling for data in use, and automatic labeling for data at rest. Please refer to https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/classifier-get-started-with.

14. Question: Is Microsoft taking steps to prevent an overuse of Copilot, to prevent unnecessary verbosity in communications? E.g., If everyone writes and reads their emails with Copilot, it effectively just adds a verbosity layer to otherwise simple communication.

Answer: Although administrative control and settings are available, the level of granularity for Copilot customization is not currently available.

15. Question: Will Copilot learn my search/prompt behavior? Because ChatGPT will take every “chat” as its own, and don’t create some sort of behavior track. In short term: will Copilot be better the more I use it, or it’s a “model” and shoot and forget prompt mask?

Answer: Although Copilot does understand your context within the organization, your recent meetings, files, and interactions with other people, each interaction with Copilot is unique.

16. Question: Is Copilot able to analyze “images”, “videos”, and deliver some sort of recommendations regarding prompt inputs?

Answer: When interacting with Copilot for Microsoft 365, the following file types can be referenced: Adobe: PDF, Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Loop): DOC, DOCX, FLUID, LOOP, PPT, PPTX, XLSX, OpenOffice: ODT, ODP, Rich Text Format: RTF, Text and Code: ASPX, RTF, TXT, Web/Hypertext: HTM, HTML. The AI technology currently focuses on text-based data and does not have the capability to understand or analyze visual data within images or videos. If you have text within an image that you’d like Copilot to help with, you would need to extract and input that text separately. Teams meetings recordings have a separate transcript that Copilot uses to analyze recorded meetings, for example.

17. Question: Regarding the “Your data is your Data”. Does that only affect on enterprise use? Or private as well? As I guess the private would be used for training purposes.

Answer: If you use Copilot (for the Web) (previously Bing Chat) you have Microsoft’s commitment to privacy. If you are using Copilot (for the Web) and sign-in to Bing, you also get Microsoft’s enterprise-grade security, compliance, and privacy. The latter is also true for Copilot for Microsoft 365. If you use Copilot (without being signed in) you are using the public instance of the LLM. If you use Copilot (and are signed in to Bing) your conversations are kept on your corporate tenant (an extra level of protection). And, you can of course only use Copilot for Microsoft 365 when signed in to your tenant, so the latter applies, but you also get Purview data classification and DLP. Microsoft never uses your prompts to train the underlying LLMs in any of these scenarios. The same cannot necessarily be said of other vendors and products that might also use a back-end into a publicly available LLM.

18. Question: What about privacy and confidential information I use in, for example, emails, Excel, etc.? Is this stored in MS Cloud services or used by LLM?

Answer: The conversations you have with Copilot for Microsoft 365 are used only within your Microsoft Cloud Services tenant. The conversation is not ethereal, meaning that once the interaction is complete, the conversation and all supporting metadata is not kept. The LLM does not keep your data and belongs to Microsoft – they don’t use external LLMs to process the

19. Question: What about privacy and confidential information I use in, for example, emails, Excel, etc.? Is this stored in MS Cloud services or used by LLM?

Answer: The conversations you have with Copilot for Microsoft 365 are used only within your Microsoft Cloud Services tenant. The conversation is not ethereal, meaning that once the interaction is complete, the conversation and all supporting metadata is not kept. The LLM does not keep your data and belongs to Microsoft – they don’t use external LLMs to process the requests.

20. Question: Is the technique of using “seeding, seed” in the prompt will work too, as it’s based on Chat GPT?

Answer: Prompt seeding, also known as prompt modification, is a feature in Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 that allows you to provide custom instructions to enhance and improve the responses from Copilot. You can use prompt seeding to provide context, instructions, or other information relevant to your use case. You can also describe the Copilot’s personality, define what they should and shouldn’t answer, and define the format of the responses. It’s important to follow best practices for prompt engineering when using custom instructions with generative answers.

21. Question: Do you have to have the Copilot Pro license to have access to all these capabilities?

Answer: There are basically 3 types of Copilot license. Copilot (free) with is accessing Copilot from within Bing. I call this Copilot for the Web and anyone can use it for free. Next, there is Copilot for Microsoft 365. You need to have a qualifying license like Microsoft 365 E3, E5, or Business Standard for you to purchase a license for Copilot for Microsoft 365. Copilot is added to your work experience in Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and others. Lastly, there is Copilot Pro. Just like Copilot for Microsoft 365, you need a qualifying license like Microsoft 365 for Individual or Family. Copilot Pro is an add-on license that gives you added functionality in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, but since Microsoft 365 for Family does not include Teams like Microsoft 365 Enterprise, you don’t get that functionality.

22. Question: Are all the features that have been demonstrated already available for organizations?

Answer: Some features demonstrated are still in preview with full functionality projected to become available later this year.

23. Question: Would you already say that Google search itself, or the classic search sites on the internet, will lose its place/usage, because AI and text to AI deliver more “drop-in direct” answers, instead of clicking through a lot of pages for answers?

Answer: Absolutely! Although there might probably be some use cases where traditional search might still be used. Remember that AI-generated responses always include references to the sources of the information if you want to dive deeper or check the interpretative answer. But getting direct answers to questions is certainly much faster than our previous techniques for data mining.