Artificial-intelligence aide handles email, meetings and other things, but its price and limited use have some skeptical

Microsoft’s new artificial-intelligence assistant for its bestselling software has been in the hands of testers for more than six months and their reviews are in: useful, but often doesn’t live up to its price.

The company is hoping for one of its biggest hits in decades with Copilot for Microsoft 365, an AI upgrade that plugs into Word, Outlook and Teams. It uses the same technology as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and can summarize emails, generate text and create documents based on natural language prompts.

Companies involved in testing say their employees have been clamoring to test the tool—at least initially. So far, the shortcomings with software including Excel and PowerPoint and its tendency to make mistakes have given some testers pause about whether, at $30 a head per month, it is worth the price

  • JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    As a reference, I’d use a search engine first, but it’s a matter of personal preference. Usually I’m only short in syntax and a particular language’s native functions. The only benefit I could foresee is avoiding the rude, condescending snarky comments from the experienced developers on stackexchange and the like, but I almost never register to post, so avoid all that. I did see a benefit in the area of (real) language learning, when I can ask it to translate something. Then break down specific parts of the response for clarification, switching between my native and the language I’m trying to learn. That was mind blowing.

    • Lmaydev@programming.dev
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      9 months ago

      I use it instead of a search engine now.

      Rather than skimming a few blog/SO posts looking for the particular info I want it pulls exactly what I need, summarizes it, provides sources and allows follow up questions.