Copilot (formerly Bing Chat)

Although ChatGPT has gotten most of the hype, there are other players in this space, and this number is likely to increase. Microsoft have several products, all based on OpenAI’s technology, and variations of the name ‘Copilot’

Of most interest to education at the moment is Microsoft Copilot (formerly known as Bing Chat), which is based on Open AI’s GPT 4 model. It is a GenAI chatbot focused on searching for information and does have access to the internet. It takes your question, performs one or more web searches based on your question, and will then attempt to summarise and answer, giving references for the sites it uses in the response.

Microsoft has also introduced Microsoft Copilot for 365 – a set of GenAI tools for Microsoft 365 (i.e. Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc). These are currently only available to institutions wishing to sign up a minimum of 300 users at $30 a month, and are not yet available in UCD.

Attribution: Adapted from A Generative AI Primer JISC National Centre for AI Version 1.3 – 2nd Jan 2024. License: CC BY-NC-SA.