Microsoft is making some important changes to its Copilot AI assistant today. There’s a new groups feature that adds multiple people to a CoPilot chat, memories to let CoPilot learn things about you, a new “real conversations” mode that will bring back some of CoPilot’s early personality, and much more.
Copilot Groups are designed for groups of friends, classmates, and even teammates to use Copilot in the same session. Microsoft is targeting it at people who need to make a plan or solve problems together, and the company is supporting up to 32 people in Copilot groups, in an effort to make AI more social.
“My guess is you’ll see groups of two or three dominating this,” Jacob Andreu, CVP of product and development at Microsoft AI, said in an interview. The Verge“I think it’s actually going to be a lot of smaller groups, it won’t be like you suddenly have AI in your long-running group chat.”
While Copilot Groups seems like it’s more suited for a work environment, it’s launching today only inside the US consumer version of Copilot, not inside the business-focused Microsoft 365 Copilot. However, this may change in the future. “I think it’s going to be amazing in terms of work,” Andreu says. “Bringing these kinds of experiences to Microsoft 365 is going to be really important.”
Microsoft is also adding an optional “Real Talk” mode to Copilot that will adapt to the way you ask questions and yield more challenging responses. When Microsoft first launched Copilot as its Bing AI chatbot, she could often be prompted to refer to herself as Sydney and would sometimes respond rudely to users. Although the actual conversation mode doesn’t bring back all the silliness of Sydney, it looks like the copilot is going to get a lot more personality in its responses.
“This mode will match your tone in a real conversation, add your perspective, and maybe be a little funnier than people expect,” says Andreu. “It’s also going to challenge you, so it’s not going to agree with everything you say.” Actual conversation won’t be the default mode, it’ll just be another mode that you select in the dropdown menu, and it’s also limited to text only and not CoPilot’s voice mode.
However, actual conversations will be able to take advantage of CoPilot’s improved memory features. Andreu explains, “Copilot’s memory is getting much better. It will be able to remember facts about you, people you care about, your life and things you’re working on.”
You’ll also be able to control what CoPilot knows about you. “You’ll be able to see a list of everything that Copilot knows about you, and you’ll be able to go in and remove things,” says Andreu. “We’re really investing in and doing a lot of that through conversation.” For example, you’ll be able to use the CoPilot voice mode to tell the AI assistant to forget everything it knows about your partner.
Copilot is also changing the way health questions are answered and drawing on answers from trusted sources like Harvard Health. “CoPilot also helps you find the right doctors quickly and confidently based on location, language, and other preferences,” says Microsoft.
Microsoft is also updating its CoPilot voice mode to introduce a new Clippy-like character, Miko. It will react with real-time expressions and bounce around the CoPilot window. It also has a Learn Live mode that acts like a tutor. You can read all about Mico right here.
