Microsoft Copilot tips: 9 ways to use Copilot right

Whether you believe AI will be the salvation of humankind or the death of it, whether you think it’s little more than a plaything to while away your time or the surest way to get onto the fast track at work, you’re going to use it someday. Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week or next month. But one day, you’ll turn to it. And you’ll most likely be surprised at how helpful it can be.

For many business users, that means using Copilot, Microsoft’s umbrella name for a variety of AI products. There are already highly targeted Copilots for various Microsoft products, notably Microsoft 365 Copilot, which integrates with Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Outlook, and OneNote. For business customers, that version of Copilot is only available through an additional subscription. For consumers, Copilot integration with these apps is included with M365 Personal and Family subscriptions, with limitations.

In this article, though, we’re going to give you tips about how to get the most out of the everyday, free version of Microsoft Copilot, available as an app for Windows, macOS, Android, or iOS; in the Edge browser; in Microsoft’s Bing search engine; and on the web. You might see it referred to as Windows Copilot, but it behaves similarly across these interfaces. In this story, I’ll cover how to use Copilot on a Windows 11 PC, but the information will be generally applicable to wherever you use it.

Know the Copilot basics

Before you start using Copilot, you need to understand exactly what it is — and what it isn’t. It’s what’s called generative AI, or genAI for short. It’s called that because it can create, or generate, different kinds of content — notably text, images, and videos. In this article, we’ll primarily cover text-based content, although I’ve got a tip for you about how to use it to create images as well.

For text generation, Copilot uses a large language model (LLM) to do its work. It’s based on ChatGPT, developed by a company called OpenAI in which Microsoft is a major investor. It’s trained on massive amounts of articles, books, web pages, and other publicly available text. Based on that training, it can respond to questions, summarize articles and documents, write documents from scratch, and much more.

Like ChatGPT, Copilot works as a chatbot. You ask it a question or feed it a prompt, and it generates a response. You can ask a series of follow-up queries in an ongoing conversation, or start over with a new query.

Using Copilot can initially be somewhat eerie, because its responses are often human-like. But don’t be fooled — it has no human intelligence. So when asking it for information, give it very precise detailed information about what you want. Microsoft also recommends that you “avoid using relative terms, like yesterday or tomorrow, and pronouns, like it and they. Instead, use specifics, such as an exact date or a person’s name.”

Multiple ways to access Copilot

The free version of Microsoft Copilot is available in several ways, including as a desktop app, a mobile app, in the Edge browser, and as a web tool in Bing or on its own.

The Copilot app for Windows, macOS, Android, or iOS

If you use Windows 10 or 11, Copilot for Windows is always just a click away — there’s an icon of it right in the middle of the taskbar. (If you don’t see the icon, try updating to the latest version of Windows 10 or 11. If you’re using Windows in a business or educational setting, your organization may not have enabled Copilot.)

Click the Copilot icon, and Copilot appears as an app that can be moved, resized, and closed like any other app.

Copilot runs like any app in Windows and can be moved, resized, and closed.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

Microsoft has just announced that a new version of the Windows app is beginning to roll out to users in its Windows Insider early testing program. Among other enhancements, the new version will include a side panel that provides quick access to previous conversations.

There are also Copilot apps for macOS, iOS, and Android. To use any of them, download it to your device, click its icon, and follow any directions that follow for installation.

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Preston Gralla / Foundry

To start using Copilot in any of these apps, simply type your query into the “Message Copilot” box.

Copilot in Bing and on the web

A simple way to use Copilot is to head to Microsoft’s Bing search website and click the Copilot button in the center of the page. That launches Copilot. You can also get there directly by heading to copilot.microsoft.com/.

Copilot is a little chattier in Bing than in the other interfaces, but it works the same way.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

Note, though, that even when you do a regular web search on Bing without selecting the Copilot button, you’ll often find answers from Copilot in addition to a web search. Copilot’s answers typically appear before the results of the web search and are labeled as coming from Copilot.

Copilot in Edge

Microsoft Edge browser users have an easy way to use Copilot — click the Copilot icon at the upper right of Edge’s screen, and a Copilot pane slides into place on the right side of the screen.

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Preston Gralla / Foundry

Type your request into the “Message Copilot” search box at the bottom of the Copilot pane, or else click one of the suggestions for things you can do with Copilot in the pane. Scroll down through the pane for all the suggestions, which change over time.

Some are directly related to the web page you’re currently on, such as “Create a summary” or “Expand on this topic.” Others might be about the news, or for topics such as “Best cities for entry-level careers now” or “Where can I find good sales for President’s Day?”

Talking with Copilot

If you’d like, you can speak with Copilot rather than interact with it via a text prompt, whether you’re using it in a desktop or mobile app, in Edge, on the web, or via Bing. To get the most out of voice chat, you’ll need to be signed in to your Microsoft account; otherwise, you can only use voice chat for two minutes per day, and the chat will simply cut off when your time’s up.

To chat with Copilot verbally, click the microphone icon, give Copilot access to your microphone when prompted (you’ll only have to do this once), and begin speaking. Copilot will speak back to you. (If you don’t like the default voice, there are three others to choose from.) You can ask follow-up questions or request changes to Copilot’s output.

You can talk with Copilot instead of typing, but you won’t get the full range of Copilot’s capabilities.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

You won’t see Copilot’s spoken responses during the voice chat, but you can view them later. When you’re done with the voice chat, click the X to the left of the mic icon. You’ll return to the main Copilot window, where you’ll see a transcript of your conversation.

Note that you’ll be limited in what you can do if you talk instead of type. For instance, Copilot currently can’t create images or summarize a web page from a voice prompt. But that may change. When Copilot Voice was first rolled out, its abilities were quite limited, and it’s gained more capabilities over time. It’s now quite capable for brainstorming and is especially useful on a mobile device.

So if you’re the kind of person who prefers speaking to typing, give it a try. If it doesn’t do what you want, you can always go back to typing your prompt.

Now that you know the Copilot basics, let’s find out how to get the most out of it with the following tips.

1. Sign into Copilot with your Microsoft account

You can use Copilot without your Microsoft account, but you can use it more effectively if you sign in. Doing that gives you several benefits. You’ll be able to start a Copilot chat on one device, such as your PC, and then continue it on another device. You can also call back individual chats you’ve had with it.

If you want to use Copilot’s “Think Deeper” feature (covered later in this article) that provides deeper, more detailed information than regular Copilot searches, you’ll have to sign in as well. And those who want to use voice chat for more than two minutes per day also need to sign in.

2. Create a web page summary

Life is too short to spend it trying to dig your way through all the text on a web page to find the few nuggets of useful information buried there. So use Copilot to summarize the contents of the web page you’re currently on in Edge.

Click the Copilot icon at the upper right of the screen, then click Create a summary in the Copilot pane. The summary will appear.

Copilot in Edge creating a summary of a web page.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

If you want to keep a copy of the summary, scroll down to the bottom of the summary, hover your cursor over it, and click the Copy message button (the rightmost button) in the toolbar that appears. Then you can paste it into Word or whatever other application you want.

3. Get more detailed information about a web page

If you’re like me, you often come across information on a web page and want more details than are provided on it. Copilot has a simple way to do that. In the Copilot pane in Edge, click Expand on this topic just to the right of “Create a summary.” You’ll get a well-organized piece of writing that offers information about each of the topics on the page. As with creating a summary, you can copy the text to the Clipboard and paste it into an application.

You can also use the results as a jumping-off point for getting more detailed information about anything in Copilot’s answer. Just ask Copilot to expand on it.

Copilot can dig more deeply into the information on any web page.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

4. Generate a first draft

For many people, the hardest part of writing is getting down a first draft. Facing an empty screen waiting to be filled with words so frightens many people that they can become paralyzed and put off working on it.

Copilot can help by generating a first draft for you. It’s best suited for documents that aren’t overly long or complex — memos, emails, marketing pitches, summaries, and similar material. It doesn’t work well on sizable reports, especially those that include other kinds of materials like spreadsheets and graphics.

To do it, launch Copilot, type in what you want it to draft for you and press Enter. Or, if you prefer, you can launch a voice chat and say your request out loud.

Copilot can help you generate a first draft of many kinds of documents.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

The more information you provide about what you’re looking for, the better your draft will be. The best prompts for Copilot include the purpose of what you’re writing, what its audience will be, what you would like emphasized, and as much detail as possible. You’ve got a maximum length of 4096 characters here, so you won’t need to be succinct. Don’t fret about exact wording — Copilot will do that for you. Just describe what you want done.

If there’s a particular tone you have in mind for the piece, make sure to include that in your description, such as professional, casual, enthusiastic, or straightforward. I’d recommend, though, that you not ask Copilot to be funny. Copilot is good at many things, but being funny isn’t one of them.

Make sure to tell Copilot what the draft will be used for. Will this be an email? A blog post? Something best suited for a paragraph format? A bulleted list of ideas? Include that as well.

Also tell Copilot how long you want the draft to be. Be as specific as possible and include a word count. If you want, though, you can leave it vague and type in short, medium, or long. If you do this, the precise word count will be affected by the tone you select — if you ask it to be enthusiastic, for example, it will create significantly longer drafts than if you ask it to be professional.

Once you’ve finished your description, press Enter or press the arrow on the right side of the input box. Copilot gets to work and writes a draft for you. After it creates the draft, you can copy it by highlighting it and copying text as you normally do, by pressing Ctrl-C.

If you’re not happy with the draft, tell Copilot to regenerate it, and offer suggestions for improving it. You can keep iterating this process until you’ve got what you want.

Copilot will also sometimes suggest other pieces of information you might want to add to the draft. The suggestions will appear just underneath the draft itself and may show prompts that might be as broad as asking if you want more details added or as granular as asking if you want to add the dimensions of a product for which you’re writing a marketing pitch.

5. Don’t be fooled by Copilot’s hallucinations

Copilot appears to be an all-seeing, all-knowing font of information, able to pull up the most arcane facts on request. That’s not the case, though. In truth, it’s more like a not-always-reliable, self-taught polymath who, when confronted with a question he can’t answer, makes something up in order to appear more knowledgeable than he really is.

That’s because Copilot, like all genAI, is subject to what AI researchers call “hallucinations” but the rest of us call lies. Every genAI lies, often with serious consequences. Take the example of Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, who gave his own lawyer a group of legal citations to be used to convince a judge to free Cohen from the court’s oversight. Cohen used Google’s Bard AI to find them. But the citations were bogus — Bard hallucinated them.

Similarly, a lawyer named Steven Schwartz suing the airline Avianca for a client submitted a 10-page brief with more than half-a-dozen citations to a judge in support of the suit. The lawyer had used ChatGPT, the brains behind Copilot, to find the citations. ChatGPT hallucinated every single one of them. The New York Times has found a number of instances in which Bing Chat — the previous name for Copilot — hallucinated incorrect information it attributed to the Times.

Don’t let this happen to you. When you use Copilot, double-check important facts and citations before using them. Typically, genAI doesn’t lie about easy-to-find straightforward facts. Rather, it’s more often arcane facts or highly specialized information like law cases that you need to be concerned about. So make sure to verify if Copilot’s so-called facts are really facts. Copilot typically includes citations for where it found information. Follow the link to each citation — you may find links to nowhere, or you may find that a fact attributed to a source is nowhere to be found at that source.

Whatever you do, don’t ask Copilot to check those facts, because there’s a reasonable chance Copilot will say they’re true. That’s what happened to Schwartz. He asked ChatGPT to verify that the fake citations were real, and ChatGPT said they were. Instead, use a search engine and double-check the information yourself.

Also, if you want to make sure what you write is as accurate as possible, don’t use Copilot to write your final draft, because it could introduce a last-minute hallucination. Copilot’s output should always be used as a starting point, not final copy.

6. Check for Copilot plagiarism

Copilot sometimes has the opposite problem to hallucinations. Rather than make things up, it copies text verbatim — or nearly verbatim — from material it’s been trained on. That can be copyright infringement, whose use carries legal consequences. And even if there are no legal consequences, if you’re found violating copyrighted information at your workplace, you could be disciplined or be fired.

It’s difficult to know how often Copilot does this. But a New York Times lawsuit against Microsoft and ChatGPT cites several instances of ChatGPT, the brains behind Copilot, plagiarizing its articles, including a Pulitzer-Prize-winning, five-part 18-month investigation into predatory lending practices in New York City’s taxi industry. The suit charges: “OpenAI had no role in the creation of this content, yet with minimal prompting, will recite large portions of it verbatim.”

It can be tough to know when Copilot’s output plagiarizes copyrighted text. However, there are things you can do to reduce the risk. First, pay attention to the tone of Copilot’s answers to your prompts. Any sections that sound different from the rest or from its previous answers could signal a problem. Rewrite that section if you have any suspicions.

If you come across text you suspect might be plagiarized, copy a section of it into your search engine and do a search. That can find original text that Copilot has plagiarized. Also, follow the citation links at the bottom of Copilot’s response to you, read through them and see whether any text has been plagiarized.

You can also try using any of the many websites that claim they check for plagiarism. I’ve tried a number of them and have been underwhelmed by their usefulness. They’re generally good at finding obvious plagiarism — every one I tried was able to say with certainty that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was written by a human, not a genAI like Copilot. But you’d be able to do the same thing on your own. However, if you want to use them, here are two free ones to try: GPTKit and ZeroGPT, which is available for free only for personal use. This article tests and reviews ten free ones.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, don’t use Copilot’s answer verbatim and pass it off as your own. Consider its output a first draft, not a finished piece of work.

Note that Microsoft indemnifies users of paid versions of Microsoft’s commercial Copilot services (such as Microsoft 365 Copilot) against claims of copyright infringement. However, that offer doesn’t extend to the free versions of Copilot covered in this article.

7. “Think Deeper” with Copilot

Sometimes Copilot’s answers can have a once-over-lightly feel to them, especially if you’re asking it complex questions. Its Think Deeper feature can alleviate that. Based on ChatGPT’s o1 reasoning model, it breaks down questions into components and steps and provides a deeper dive into topics. Because of that, it takes extra time providing an answer, typically about 30 seconds or so.

To use Think Deeper, just click the Think Deeper button at the right end of the Copilot input box, then enter your query. When you’re done with Think Deeper, click the button again to turn it off.

Think Deeper provides a deeper dive into topics than regular Copilot results.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

Note that Microsoft appears to be in the process of rolling out Think Deeper across the various Copilot interfaces. My editor, for example, was able to use Think Deeper in the macOS Copilot app and via the web app, but it was not yet available in her Edge browser on macOS. If you find that it’s not available for you in one interface, try another.

In my tests, I found “Think Deeper” lived up to its billing. I asked both basic Copilot and the Think Deeper feature, “What is the best way for me to become a government contractor to sell my Work@Home office furniture to the federal government?” I then compared the answers. Copilot by itself offered useful if somewhat general advice, such as “Stay compliant with all federal contracting rules and regulations, including reporting and documentation requirements.”

Think Deeper gave a more useful answer with more specific advice, including “Ensure your furniture meets any relevant standards, like ANSI/BIFMA for safety and durability. Also, be mindful of the Trade Agreements Act (TAA), which requires products to be made or substantially transformed in the U.S. or designated countries.”

Keep in mind that just because the feature gives you deeper answers, it doesn’t mean they’re always right. So you should still check it for hallucinations. You may, however likely find fewer of them than if you’re using Copilot as your normally do.

8. Go back to previous Copilot conversations

There’s a good chance that at some point you’ll want to revisit a conversation you’ve had with Copilot. Although it seems as if they vanish once you close Copilot, that’s not the case. You can easily view a list of them and go back to any you’d like. You’ll first have to sign into your Microsoft account on Copilot if you want to do it.

To do it, click the View history button to the left of the Copilot input box — it’s an icon of a clock enclosed by a circular arrow. If you don’t see the View history button, click the Copilot logo to the left of the input box. The main interface will change to what Microsoft calls the Copilot home page, which offers up suggested chat topics. At the same time, the View history button will replace the Copilot logo on the entry bar.

You can access your chat history by calling up the Copilot home page and clicking the View history button.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

When you click View history, Copilot lists the most recent conversations, by day. They’re listed not by the specific prompt you used, but instead by a summary, such as “Selling to the federal government” or “Image request for woman working.”

In the pop-up list, click the title of the conversation you want to revisit, and you’ll be sent back to it. If you want to share the conversation with others, click the arrow to the right of the title. That brings up a popup. Click “Create & Copy Link” and you can send that link to someone else. You can also delete the conversation by clicking the trash icon to the far right of the title.

When you sign into Copilot, your conversations are saved and can be reviewed and revisited on multiple devices, such as a PC and an iPhone.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

You’ll be able to revisit conversations on any device on which you’ve signed into Copilot. Each device lists all conversation you’ve had on all your devices, if you’ve signed into them for the conversations.

In my tests, Copilot kept 10 months of conversations. But that may vary from person to person. When I asked Copilot how long it kept conversations, it responded, “I actually don’t have the specifics about how long your conversation history is kept,” and pointed me to a Microsoft privacy statement that did not have an answer, either.

9. Create and use images with Copilot

Copilot is not just a text-based chatbot. It can also create images and give you information about an image you upload to it, such as a photograph of a city. Its ability to create copyright-free images is particularly useful for those who need them for brochures, sales presentations, and other similar material.

You create images in the same way that you create drafts of documents. Start off by describing the image you want — for example, “Make an image of a woman sitting at a desk in her home office working on a computer.”

You can have Copilot make copyright-free images you can use in brochures, or for other purposes.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

As with creating text-based documents, the more information you provide, the better. Tell Copilot, for example, for what purpose you’ll be using the document. Describe the tone you want, such as formal, cozy, business-like, playful, and so on. Don’t settle for the first image. Keep asking Copilot to make changes until you have one you want. Once you’re happy with the image, download it by clicking the download button to the right of the image.

Keep in mind that the images Copilot creates tend to be highly idealized and have the feel of something created by AI, so you may need to continue to iterate until you have one that’s not quite so artificial-looking.

I’ve found that sometimes when you ask Copilot to create an image, it doesn’t display the image, but does display a download button. If this happens to you, click the download button — the image it created will be downloaded.

You can also ask Copilot to provide information about a photograph. To do that, copy it into Copilot and ask it to identify it for you and provide additional information. You can be as detailed as you like when asking the question.

This works well for most images. However, Copilot won’t identify photographs of people — guardrails have been put around that for privacy purposes.

Asking Copilot to identify a location.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

Bonus tip: Remove the Copilot icon from the Windows taskbar

Not everyone is a fan of AI. You may be among the people who don’t want to use it. Or maybe you just don’t like having the Copilot icon smack dab in the middle of your taskbar. If that’s you, you can remove the icon. Right-click it and select Unpin from taskbar. There’s no way to remove the Copilot icon from Edge, though.

This article was originally published in January 2024 and updated in March 2025.