Microsoft Copilot Pro

Aug 16, 2024

So Microsoft launched a new subscription service for their Copilot AI. Luckily, I somehow got offered a free trial, and so I shall take the chance to give a proper review of it.

Copilot Chat

By default, without the subscription, Copilot uses the following GPTs:
GPT-4 (Turbo during non-peak hours) - Creative and Precise
GPT-3.5 - Balanced

With the subscription, Copilot uses the following GPTs:
GPT-4 Turbo - Creative, Balanced, and Precise

So what's the point of a subscription here? If you aren't using copilot during peak hours, the only benefit you theoretically get in this specific field is the confirmation that you will be on the best GPT, but even the "worse" GPT-4 is perfectly capable for most people. The only people who benefit from this are people who use AI every hour of the day and need as quick of an answer as possible. The only benefit is Balanced gets GPT-4 Turbo.

Copilot in Office apps

This is another feature I'm very lost about. On one hand, it saves you time. On the other, it absolutely sucks compared to what a human can do. AI is just not good if you want to write an essay or create a presentation. And for Excel it's even worse! It can only read data in tables, which, I guess, makes sense, but come on, the data is there in the cells too, I'm not gonna make a table for every time I want to examine data. It might be useful for big corporations, but the average person is just not going to benefit from this at all. Lastly, there is AI for Outlook. It's only available for @outlook emails so I can't even test it because I have signed up on my @gmail email. I get wanting to make people use your service, but Outlook as the domain does not have nearly enough market share to justify this.

But I still have to cover what I can, so here it is. In terms of writing an essay, it's just what you expect. It's basically like going on bing.com, going to the Copilot section, and asking it to write one. Not worth it.

Powerpoint, however, is one that I am mostly disappointed in. Granted, it did take only a minute or so, but the presentation strayed completely off topic of what I gave it and hardly covered what it should have. It also just looked more basic. In 30 minutes, I was able to create a far better presentation. Another benefit is mine was actually something I could freely speak about whereas Copilot's I would have to learn, which would take way more than 30 minutes.

Extra Features

There are a few nice features that some might appreciate. However, again, all of them are kinda useless. The 100 boosts for image generator. 15 is plenty unless you are one of those AI twitter bots that sends AI generated images or something.

There's also the GPT creator. It's nice if you need customisation, but it's just kinda useless for most people. I never used it.

Closing thoughts

Copilot Pro for 20 a month. And unless you are Jeffery Bezos himself or you need the specialised features, it's not worth it. For most, if not all, people, the free version is great and does everything they would need.