screenshot by Lance Whitney/ZDNET
Those of you who subscribe to Microsoft’s AI-powered Copilot Pro service will now be able to access all the Pro features through the iOS and Android apps. On Friday, Microsoft added Pro support to the two mobile apps as the company had previously promised.
For $20 a month, Copilot Pro is a premium flavor of the free Copilot service, providing generative AI smarts to answer your questions, respond to your requests, and generate text and images. The Pro version offers a few enhanced features over the free edition, including:
- Faster performance and priority access to GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo during peak times.
- Copilot availability in certain Microsoft 365 apps (Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription required)
- Faster AI image creation with 100 boosts per day using Designer (formerly Bing Image Creator)
And on the way, according to Microsoft, is the ability to create your own custom and tailored Copilot GPTs via a new Copilot Builder tool, just like with ChatGPT Pro.
Both the free and paid versions of Copilot are accessible on the web, through a Taskbar icon in Windows 10 and 11, and now through the iPhone and Android apps. After signing up for a Pro subscription at the Copilot Pro website, the Pro version will automatically show up on the website, on the Windows Taskbar, and in the mobile apps. You can easily tell because the word Pro will appear as part of the Copilot name.
But here’s the $64 question (or maybe the $20 question), is the Pro version worth the subscription cost? Well, that depends. Unless you’re using Copilot constantly through the day and need the GPT-4 priority access and quick image creation, the only real benefit at this point is the integration with Microsoft 365. If you don’t subscribe to Microsoft 365 Personal or Family, then you can save yourself $20 a month and skip the Pro version for now.
For those of you who do subscribe to Microsoft 365, you’re able to get AI-driven assistance in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Specifically, Copilot Pro will help you write and edit text and summarize documents in Word, generate formulas and analyze data in Excel, create presentations in PowerPoint, and draft replies and organize your inbox in Outlook.
Whether those features are worth the cost depends on how much you want or need help from AI to fine-tune your documents, presentations, and emails. If you’re on the fence, you can always subscribe for a month and then cancel if you don’t find the benefits of much value. Otherwise, you may want to wait until Microsoft rolls out the ability to create your own custom Copilot GPTs to see if and how that feature catches on.
