Microsoft is making some significant changes to its Copilot AI assistant today. There’s a modern group feature that brings multiple people together in Copilot chat, a memory that lets Copilot learn lots of things about you, a modern “real talk” mode that brings back some of Copilot’s original personality, and much more.
Copilot Groups are designed for groups of friends, classmates, or even team members who can exploit Copilot in one session. Microsoft is targeting this offering at people who need to plan a plan or solve problems together, and the company supports up to 32 people in Copilot groups in an effort to make AI more social.
“I would guess that groups of two or three people dominate this,” says Jacob Andreou, vice president of product and development at Microsoft AI, in an interview Edge. “I think it’s actually going to be a lot of small groups. It’s not going to be like AI suddenly appears in your long-running group chat.”
While Copilot Groups appears to be more ideally suited to work environments, it will only launch today in the US consumer version of Copilot, rather than the business version of Microsoft 365 Copilot. However, this may change in the future. “I think it will be amazing in terms of work,” says Andreou. “Bringing experiences like this to Microsoft 365 will be really important.”
Microsoft is also adding an optional “real talk” mode to Copilot, which will adapt to the way you ask questions and provide more challenging answers. When Microsoft first launched Copilot as its Bing AI chatbot, it was often prompted to call itself Sydney and sometimes respond rudely to users. While real talk mode doesn’t bring back Sydney’s full sass, it sounds like Copilot is about to gain a lot more personality in its responses.
“In a real conversation, this mode will match your tone, add your own perspective, and maybe be a little more witty than people expect,” says Andreou. “It will also challenge you, so she won’t agree with everything you say.” Real Talk will not be the default mode, it will simply be a different mode selected from the drop-down menu that will be circumscribed to text only and not the co-pilot’s voice mode.
Real conversation, however, will benefit from Copilot’s memory feature improvements. “Copilot has a much better memory. It will be able to remember facts about you, the people you care about, your life and the things you are working on,” Andreou explains.
You’ll also be able to control what Copilot knows about you. “You’ll be able to see a list of everything Copilot knows about you, and you’ll be able to go in and delete things,” Andreou says. “We really want to invest, and we often do it in a conversational way.” For example, you’ll be able to exploit Copilot’s voice mode to ask the AI assistant to forget everything it knows about your partner.
Copilot is also making changes to the way it answers health-related questions, improving the way it sources and bases answers on trusted sources like Harvard Health. “Copilot also helps you find the right doctors quickly and confidently by matching them based on location, language and other preferences,” Microsoft says.
Microsoft is also updating its Copilot voice mode with the introduction of Mico, a modern Clippy-like character. It will respond with expressions in real time and bounce around the Copilot window. It also has a live learning mode that acts like a teacher. You can read all about Mico here.