Microsoft launches Copilot Pro subscription with GPT 4 Turbo for $20 per month

What just happened? Microsoft has announced a paid version of Copilot for consumers. Called Copilot Pro, the new subscription tier costs $20 per month per user and will offer "a higher tier of service for AI capabilities" to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers. The new service will not be bundled with the Microsoft 365 subscription, and users will have to sign up for Copilot Pro separately, much like the Copilot enterprise offering.

Copilot Pro has a number of features over and above the regular Copilot. First off, the paid tier will give Microsoft 365 Personal or Family plan subscribers access to Copilot GenAI features in Office apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote on PC, Mac and iPad. According to Microsoft , Copilot for Microsoft 365 will not only work across emails, meetings, chats, and documents, but also on the web.

It will be able to generate status updates from simple natural language prompts, based on emails and chat threads. It will also be able to generate text in Word, analyze data in Excel, design presentations in PowerPoint, summarize meetings in Teams, and more. In Outlook, Copilot will help write emails to make it easier to reply to coworkers.

Another Copilot Pro feature is enhanced image creation with Image Creator from Designer (formerly Bing Image Creator). The process is now faster with 100 boosts per day, and will include better image quality with landscape formatting options. Subscribers to Copilot Pro will also get priority access to the newest GenAI models, including OpenAI's GPT 4 Turbo, which Microsoft claims will offer better performance during peak hours.

In addition to the aforementioned features, Copilot Pro will also enable users to create their own Copilot GPT, allowing them to customize Copilot for specific topics with just a simple set of prompts. Called Copilot GPT Builder, the feature is said to be "coming soon," but there's no word on when it will be available.

In addition to Copilot Pro for consumers, Microsoft is also rolling out its AI assistant to more small businesses. Until now, companies had to buy a minimum of 300 seats for commercial plans, but that requirement is now going away, allowing business to buy between 1 and 299 seats for $30 per person per month.

With the broadening of Copilot's business availability, it is now generally accessible for all small businesses with Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Business Standard subscriptions..