Copilots everywhere!
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will have heard talk of Microsoft Copilots. These are the generative AI driven assistants and aids that are appearing in about all Microsoft products and have even got their own dedicated key on our keyboards (so long Office key!). What I want to do here is take a look at how Copilot is building an Accessible future – today!
Page Contents
- Copilot – not Autopilot
- 1. GitHub Copilot – Developing with an army of millions
- 2. Copilot for Microsoft 365 (aka Office)
- 3. Copilot in Windows
- 4. Copilot in the Power Platform
- This is my Copilot
- Conclusion
Copilot – not Autopilot
Microsofts choice of naming is, in a simple way, a turn of genius. People expect AI to come along, take jobs, and leave us with nothing to do. By calling them Copilots Microsoft are making it clear that these are here to assist, not take over. Whilst these are more than just chatbots, in that they can generate content or control actions, they do so only under direction and direct request.
An example is generating a sample PowerPoint slide deck for a presentation with proposed slides that match the purpose. E.g. a Sales deck created by Copilot might contain slides such as a company intro, product highlights, pricing structure, benefits. It may even get some of that info from SharePoint or OneDrive. The end result will still require human intervention and validation.
AI can do the repetitive, basic, tasks that bore us all to tears and leave us to do the jobs that require intuition, interpretation, experience, and more. It’s not replacing us, it’s allowing us to focus on the tasks that require the use of our intellect.
Whilst it is easy to be tired of hearing the word Copilot, the capabilities and potential are exciting and useful. But how does this help with Accessibility and creating an inclusive digital future? Let’s take a look at a few ways this is happening now.
1. GitHub Copilot – Developing with an army of millions
The first Copilot was not dropped into the Office products, or even Windows, but rather into GitHub. Powered by OpenAI this landed with a thunderous bang as AI code completion became a new way of working. Suddenly developers had a pair programmer constantly at their fingertips able to suggest whole blocks of code. Ask it to write a function to display “Hello World” and the code will be suggested for you.
Possibly even more helpful is that it can read blocks of code and then comment them. As an ex-developer I know how much devs just love commenting code. I also know how much devs hate picking up code that hasn’t been commented!
This tool is one that has written millions of lines of code now and has sped up sevelopment for many of its users. Is it perfect? Does it write the most efficient or performant code? No. That’s where experience and the human touch come in.
This is useful for any developers writing code. For coders with disabilities though it adds a whole new layer. Developers with disabilities using alternative input tools can often find long sessions of “typing” exhausting. With GitHub Copilot they can now get whole blocks of code generated and then focus their energy on making the code work better. That daily effort can be put towards doing the more challenging, and often more fulfilling, work.
Now I could continue to write a thousand words on how GitHub Copilot can help with accessible development but Rory Preddy does this as part of his day job and can explain far better than me. You can also read more about the GitHub Copilot page here.
2. Copilot for Microsoft 365 (aka Office)
One of the most impactful areas of generative AI is within the Microsoft 365 world. This incorporates the apps formerly known as Office along with other productivity tools such as Teams, SharePoint and more. Going from the capability to take a sales brochure and generate a PowerPoint deck from it to summarising a Teams call in any number of ways there are many ways that this offers a new way of interacting with, and producing, our company data and collateral.
Some of the other ways that this can be used include:
- Summarising emails received
- Providing a list of action points, and owners, from a Teams meeting
- Generating or summarising data in Excel
- Creating document outlines and skeleton content in Word
- and many more…
I’ll be honest and admit that I don’t know how accessible the content that the Copilot produces is. There is a monthly cost involved in using Copilot for Microsoft 365 and that currently puts it out of my reach. I would hope that it produces content that passes the Accessibility Checker!
What I do know is that the Teams Copilot has a massive impact for people with disabilities or assistive needs. The ability to summarise a call, or ask what someone just said, or see how much you contributed to a call, can make calls easier for those with ADHD for example.
As with the Github Copilot the auto-generation of content also provides a benefit for those who use alternative navigation means etc. The ability to ask it to produce outlines and “starters for 10” simplifies the workload and allows people to concentrate on the detail rather than the mundane.
I must confess that I most definitely fall into the camp calling for a Copilot powered Clippy. Having that chirpy chappy powered by the capabilities of GPT is a mouth-watering prospect that I would love to see!
You can see more about Copilot for Microsoft 365 over at the Microsoft website here.
3. Copilot in Windows
“Hey Cortana”. If there were two words that promised so much but delivered too little then it is those. As with Clippy I world love to see a return of Cortana but powered by all the goodies in Copilot, but that will not happen for a long time – if ever. What we do have now is Copilot in Windows.
This provides the Bing Copilot experience within Windows along with some control capabilities such as:
- Turn on/off Dark Mode
- Set Focus mode
- Launch troubleshooters
- Turn up the volume
- Summarise a website in the current active Edge Tab
- and more…
The feature is currently in preview but the capabilities keep on improving and will no doubt soon provide a great deal of ways of interacting with our PCs, files, and other areas (e.g. web search etc)
This level of control, and the ability to launch the Copilot via a voice command, has clear benefits for users of assistive technologies and expands the scope of generative AI within daily life.
To read more about Copilot in Windows you can head on over here where more of the features are detailed.
4. Copilot in the Power Platform
You didn’t think I would post an article about Copilot and not include the Power Platform did you? Of course I have to mention it! Here are some of the capabilities and possibilities presented by Copilot across the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 first party apps:
- Create Apps with Copilot in Power Apps
- Convert sample data into expressions in Power Automate
- Build simple flows in Power Automate by describing what you want to do
- Summarise data in Power BI
- Build your own Copilots in Copilot Studio (formerly known as Power Virtual Agents)
- Access Sales data and more using Microsoft Copilot for Sales and Sales Copilot (yes, 2 separate products!)
At the moment the generative elements of Copilot within Power Apps and Power Automate are limited, although the expression generator is more reliable. What they do show is the potential for what is to come along with a clear statement of intent from Microsoft as to the direction and usage of Copilot.
Where it is more capable is within Power BI and within the first party Dynamics 365 solutions. The ability to query and summarise data with natural language allows people to get to the information they need quickly and easily.
As we move further forward into a Copilot-driven future we can expect to see more and more capabilities and possibilities added. Certainly the more repetitive, foundational, elements of any part of the Platform could become AI-led releasing us to focus on delivering the complexities of business processes and development work.
All of this will hopefully lead into a more accessible development experience for assistive technology users, as well as the creation of solutions that are accessible by design. Whilst we wait for that dream the immediate benefits are as outlined in all the previous sections.
You can read about Copilot for Power Platform in the following links:
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