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The next wave of changes to Microsoft Copilot will bring two new features to help the AI platform better interact with additional tools. The two new features are gradually rolling out to Windows Insider beta testers, with a general release date yet to be confirmed.
Microsoft is launching a new feature called Connectors to let Copilot interact with other tools, including its own OneDrive and Outlook. It will be able to interact with your Outlook Calendar, Contacts, and email.
Alongside Microsoft products, it’s also launching with support for Google’s Calendar, Contacts, Drive, and Gmail. The new feature will let you retrieve information from these tools with a simple prompt search.
Microsoft’s examples include asking "what’s the email address for Sarah?” to find it within Gmail or Outlook. Another example is “find my school notes from last week," and it'd find your Drive or OneDrive files. That information will then be pulled into Copilot without you having to leave the app to find it elsewhere.
You can pick and choose which services you want Copilot to have access to. Head to Settings within Copilot for Windows, then find Connectors. Here you’ll find each of the compatible apps, which you can then enable individually.
The second feature lets Copilot make its responses into Microsoft Office files. The feature supports Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, as well as PDF documents.
For example, if you have a lot of text generated within a Copilot interaction, you can tell it to “export this text to a Word document” and it’ll automatically make the file for you. It’ll also work for numerical data bring brought into an Excel file, or any response other into a PDF. It’s not entirely clear how the feature works for PowerPoint, but it likely makes a basic presentation with its key points.
These file types are generated after putting in a prompt to ask for it, but but if Copilot's response is over 600 characters it will also suggest the option to you.
These new features are launching for all Windows Insiders from now and will roll out gradually. It means you'll have to wait for these to appear on the standard version of Copilot. If you’re part of Microsoft’s preview program, expect to see the changes within version 1.25095.161.0 and higher.