Microsoft has seasoned almost every piece of its software and services offerings with its pre-generative artificial intelligence platform Copilot like its chipotle sauce in 2012, and in two months OneDrive will finally gain support for it as well.
As Microsoft continues to roll out its updated OneDrive UI for most users, it’s doubling up its upgrade release with support for Copilot in OneDrive scheduled for April 2024 for Microsoft 365 subscriptions.
According to the Microsoft OneDrive blog, in April, Microsoft 365 licenses will gain access to new and additional ways to access and interact with files stored in the cloud.
Get information and insights from your files: Here are a few examples of prompts you can use to get information from your files1:
• What were the total beverage sales last week? Put response in a table view by day.
• Compare the main differences between the selected files and put the differences in a table view.
• What are the pros and cons of project Moonshot?
Find files using natural language: Looking for a file? No need to hunt for it, just ask Copilot to find it for you with prompts like these1:
• I’ve been on vacation for a week. Show me recent files on Project Moonshot.
• What files should I read to get started on project SkyDance?
Create outlines, tables, and FAQs from your content: You can take things to the next level by asking Copilot to create content based on existing files using prompts like these1:
Using the/sales-enablement.docx as reference, create an outline of a sales pitch to a new customer.
• For these selected resumes, create a table with names, current title, years of experience, educational qualifications, and current location.
• Create a list of frequently asked questions about project Moonshot.
• Look at /proposal1.docx and /proposal2.docx and create a table outlining the differences in cost, milestones, and date of delivery.
Improve content: Have a document, spreadsheet, or presentation that you want to improve? Try these prompts1:
• What suggestions do you have to improve the deck /new-sales-process.ppt?
• What improvements should I make to this selected file to prepare it for a leadership review?
Generate file summaries: Need a quick overview? Copilot can summarize the contents of one or multiple files, including PDFs, offering you quick insights without the need to sift through each file. Try prompts such as1:
• Summarize the key points from moonshot-plan.pdf, Moonshot-timeline.docx, moonshot-GTM.ppt
• Summarize long-industry-report.pdf. List out its 3 main points and tell me about the industry risks and open questions.
However, for all of Copilot for OneDrive’s new assist functions of this to be useable, Microsoft will need to make sure most file languages are supported out of the box and fortunately all the major ones will be including:
• 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
In addition, users will be able to leverage Copilot for OneDrive to add pre-generative notes on shared files so recipients can get a quick summary of a document’s contents without having to do a full extraction and open. Copilot for OneDrive file sharing summaries will include summations of document engagement, notifications, and general context.
Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Copilot for OneDrive now support up to eight major languages with seventeen more planned for by the end of April 2024 that include English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese (Simplified) initially and Arabic, Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Ukrainian in the future.