Microsoft Copilot "AI-Powered Chat Assistant" Now Has an Android App
There’s another new generative AI chatbot available on the Android Play Store - Microsoft Copilot (which I’m going to shorten to MS Copilot for the rest of this post). Here’s an excerpt from its Play Store description:
Improve Your Productivity with Copilot–Your AI-Powered Chat Assistant
Copilot is a pioneering chat assistant from Microsoft powered by the latest OpenAI models, GPT-4 and DALL·E 3. These advanced AI technologies provide fast, complex, and precise responses, as well as the ability to create breathtaking visuals from simple text descriptions.
Chat and create all in one place—for free!
Its listing of key features highlights work and personal tasks it can take on, including:
Draft emails
Compose stories or scripts
Summarize complex texts
Create personalized travel itineraries
Quickly create high quality visuals from text prompts
Generate logo designs
The feature list is impressive, though not surprising given that GPT-4 is widely considered to be current leader amongst large language models used in GenAI and DALL·E 3 is among the top tier for image generation.
MS Copilot has plenty of competition on Android from other leading AI apps, including several that I’ve found useful for cybersecurity professionals and written about recently:
Having said that, first impressions of MS Copilot are mostly good, despite seeing the words “with Bing” associated with it :) It is quite fast in returning text responses to voice prompts and offers very detailed comprehensive responses to technical queries in my early interactions with it. Here are two excerpts from my original query and then a follow-up query asking to create a Kusto Query Language (KQL) query (used in threat hunting in Microsoft security tools) that looks for IoCs (indicators of compromise) from a recent series of attacks against US critical infrastructure:
Both of these were solid efforts. As with any content created by GenAI, they would need to be reviewed, and possibly tweaked, before running; even so, they would almost certainly be a faster option than creating the same queries from scratch.
It also had a very good response when I asked about the best selling book called The Coming Wave - a compelling look at “the unprecedented risks that AI and other fast-developing technologies pose to global order, and how we might contain them while we have the chance” - even including links to reviews and where to purchase the book. More importantly, it offered a really good and thorough summation of the primary themes of the book.
MS Copilot offers inline links to sources it used in generating its response and More Information links at the bottom of some of its responses. Apart from the technical research abilities, MS Copilot offers some lighter, fun options. It can write poems or song lyrics or quiz you in a trivia game style.
A few little almost “gotcha” things to be aware of with MS Copilot:
As I said above, it’s quick at generating its responses in text, but when they are detailed and long, the voice responses can be quite slow. Once you see that text generation has stopped, you can can stop the voice response by tapping the microphone at the bottom center of the app.
You do not have to sign-in to use the app, but it won’t save your chat history if you’re not signed in with a Microsoft account.
The app is not capable of continuous conversation right now (or at least I have not found how to make it do that).
Have any of you tried our MS Copilot? Are you using any GenAI apps on your phone?