Microsoft continues to market its artificially intelligent powered Copilot platform in its various products such as search, email and Word, and soon the company will apply it to OneNote.
While users have been getting videos and GIFs over the past three weeks of how Copilot will eventually work throughout Microsoft’s Office 365 apps, it hasn’t been until yesterday that the company showed off the tech being used with its premiere note taking app.
According to a post on the Microsoft 365 blog, penned by Greg Mace who is a product manager on the OneNote team, “Microsoft 365 Copilot is coming to OneNote. This powerful tool combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data from the Microsoft Graph—notes, calendars, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and more—and the Microsoft 365 apps to turn your words into a powerful productivity tool.”
Similar to Copilots functions in Word, Outlook and PowerPoint, eventually, the AI assistant in OneNote is intended to help expedite “mundane tasks,” by providing prompts to draft plans, generate ideas, create lists, and organize information as the user journeys through the app.
Furthermore, Microsoft intends for Copilot in OneNote to be able to “transform existing text by summarizing, rewriting, formatting, and adding visual context.”
Copilot for OneNote seemingly has the most potential and freedom to showcase its value as free-form brainstorming tool for a wide variety of interests such as generating topics for annual investors meeting, creating a plan for a birthday party or graduation, summarizing bulleted meeting points, planning Spring Break trips abroad or creating a business plan for local coffee retail effort.
While some of this can be achieved through the new Bing Chat service, being able to have direct access to the results on any platform regardless of search engine preference is perhaps ideal for more users.
In addition, Microsoft 365 Copilot is a bit different than Bing Chat, as it adheres to a higher standard of security and privacy which prevents the language models from being trained on tenant data.
Mace makes no mention of when Copilot will land on OneNote nor is there any reference to the cost of having this enabled from either a business or consumer perspective.
