News
Microsoft Opens Doors to Copilot's 'Labs' for Select Pro Users
Microsoft on Tuesday announced a program that would let some paying Copilot users test drive new AI features before they become generally available.
Called "Copilot Labs," the program is open to a "small subset" of Copilot Pro subscribers, according to Microsoft's announcement. Copilot Pro is the $20 per user per month version of Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant that gives subscribers priority access to popular AI models at peak hours, as well as native AI features in Microsoft 365 applications.
Now, Microsoft is giving these users another perk: early access to AI capabilities still in development. It's effectively an ongoing beta program, offering selected subscribers new features before they're widely released, along with the opportunity to provide feedback to Microsoft. These subscribers will see certain features marked "Copilot Labs" when they're signed in to their Copilot Pro accounts.
Microsoft positioned the program as a way to ensure its AI features are as secure and robust as possible before broadening their availability. "Before releasing our most advanced tools to all users, we are trialing them for a small subset to gather feedback, learn, and then applying these lessons back into the product -- making them at once, we hope, better and safer," the company said.
Microsoft is currently putting two features through their paces in Copilot Labs: "Think Deeper" and "Copilot Vision."
Think Deeper
Available as of Tuesday to a "limited number of Copilot Pro users" is a new capability that lets Copilot solve complex problems using step-by-step calculations. Think Deeper will cause Copilot to respond more slowly to prompts because it actively reasons through problems and provides detailed explanations for its responses. However, doing so makes it an ideal AI tool for math, engineering and related fields.
According to Microsoft, Think Deeper uses "the very latest reasoning models." Though it doesn't say so outright, those models very likely include OpenAI's new o1 models that use chain-of-thought reasoning to answer prompts.
Microsoft currently caps Think Deeper usage based on how many Copilot Pro subscribers are using it at a given time. Per this FAQ, "Usage of Think Deeper is limited by a weekly number of messages." It currently only supports English, and is limited to users in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Broader availability and language support are in the works, however.
Copilot Vision
A feature in the Microsoft Edge browser, Copilot Vision responds to spoken, natural language queries using context from what a user is currently seeing on their device. "If you want it to, it can understand the page you're viewing and answer questions about its content," said Microsoft. "It can suggest next steps, answer questions, help navigate whatever it is you want to do and assist with tasks. All the while you simply speak it to in natural language."
Microsoft has implemented several guardrails to keep Copilot Vision from accessing prohibited content or Web sites. For instance, it's not enabled by default -- users have to opt in to use it. It can be turned off anytime, and it will automatically deactivate after five minutes idle. It also can't be used to breach site paywalls or to access sites with "sensitive content." In fact, the early version that's available through Copilot Labs can only be used on a shortlist of Microsoft-approved sites. Moreover, it will only provide responses using context from the site that the user is currently viewing; it won't reference other sites.
Microsoft anticipates that a side effect of Copilot Vision will be users spending more time on sites, increasing traffic for those that support the feature. Copilot Vision can recognize and comply with Web site controls and copyright restrictions, Microsoft's FAQ indicated, adding, "Microsoft respects the machine-readable directions provided by websites that do not want content on their pages to be used with our generative AI models."
Microsoft said it will not use data from Copilot Vision to train its AI models, and the feature is programmed to essentially forget data after each user session. (The exception is diagnostic data related to system errors, bugs and crashes.)