At least initially, Copilot, which Microsoft classifies as an AI assistant, underwhelmed its users and was seemingly ill-equipped for what it was promised to be capable of. Its utility in Windows 11 was incredibly limited, in large part because it was a glorified version of the Bing Chatbot that has since been rebranded as a web-based version of Copilot. Features that seemed like no-brainers, like using a Copilot prompt to get into a menu deep within system settings instead of clicking through various preceding menus, were not implemented. To make matters worse, only apps could be opened from Copilot, not even other types of files.
There have been improvements to Copilot in recent months, though. The free tool has been upgraded to the latest and greatest models from OpenAI, including the GPT-4 Turbo Large Language Model, which requires a $20 per month ChatGPT Plus subscription if you go through OpenAI. The image generation AI has also been updated to the latest revision of DALL-E 3. So even though there is still a lot of work to be done on Copilot, it still has plenty of value as a free way to access the newest OpenAI tech. Since Copilot leverages Microsoft’s Bing search engine to provide citation links for factual matters, it’s arguably a better choice than the base OpenAI versions, regardless.
