by Microsoft recently said that the impact of AI on our lives will be as significant as the computer and the internet – which you would expect from a company that has just invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.
But Microsoft is far from alone in making these claims – and ChatGPT’s talents, including advanced text generation and question answering, could be game-changing. But just how much could AI and machine learning tools change Microsoft 365, formerly known as Microsoft Office?
Currently, there is no timescale for Microsoft to integrate OpenAI technology into its suite of productivity applications, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. But the process has already begun and recent reports suggest that Microsoft will soon add ChatGPT talents to its Office suite and Bing search engine, which could change the way we use them.
Based on what we know about ChatGPT’s strengths and how they might apply to Microsoft 365, here are five ways AI tech is likely to change the way we use apps like Outlook, Word and PowerPoint.
5 ways ChatGPT could change Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office, now known as Microsoft 365, has its own AI-powered tools thanks to Project Turing (opens in a new tab). As of 2017, the latter has added features such as Assistive AI (see below) for suggested email responses and ‘Smart Find’ for searching your documents.
But OpenAI tools like ChatGPT promise to come with Microsoft’s own AI research to supercharge those functions and unlock new ones. Thanks to its skills in language processing and data analysis, Microsoft’s partnership with ChatGPT could help…
1. Solve your email headache
For most of us, email is now an ancient chore that lacks the presence of the best online collaboration tools like Slack. But pre-trained generation transformers (or GPTs) promise to conquer our inboxes, thanks to their ability to crunch text and extract meaning from it.
According to The Information (opens in a new tab), Microsoft “recently looked at how Outlook and Word could use GPT to suggest automatic replies to other emails”. This could go far beyond the simple autocomplete suggestions we have now – Microsoft also apparently talked about “creating chatbot-style programs inside Word and Outlook that write entire fields of text”.
Ultimately, your role with email may be to approve or lightly edit suggested responses, rather than setting aside an hour to trawl through them. ChatGPT could also help with scheduling meetings or organizing travel, both of which are good news for us.
2. Make you (seem) a better writer
One of ChatGPT’s great strengths is generating text in response to a prompt. The content of an AI chatbot’s responses isn’t always as factually sound as its confident tone suggests, but the writing itself can convincingly take on the nuance and character of a particular author.
This is where ChatGPT, especially the incoming GPT-4 model, could have some of the biggest impacts on the likes of Outlook and Word. Third party apps like Hemingway (opens in a new tab) already act as our virtual sub-editors, but these tools will be more incorporated into apps like Microsoft Office to improve our writing.
You’ll be able to hit a button and get a tougher version of the report you’ve just written, or get suggestions for removing jargon. What impact could auto-generated text eventually have on our writing skills? That’s a tough question for another day, but in the short term it could iron out wrinkles like an over-reliance on the passive voice in our documents and emails.
3. Summarize your meetings
Microsoft’s ‘At a Glance’ feature is already able to summarize your Word documents with bullet point summaries, but ChatGPT integration could take this to the next level and spread it across Microsoft 365 apps .
For example, a long report could be automatically compressed into a digestible PowerPoint presentation. The same technology could automatically summarize the transcripts created during your Team meetings, saving you the task of creating a follow-up email from scratch.
This combination of Turing’s ability to understand text and ChatGPT’s ability to generate it automatically could take the pain out of the repetition many of us are used to in creating documents or written text for multiple formats, from presentations to email. You’ll still have the power to do the final sign-off, but the legwork of creating PowerPoints and post-meeting emails could soon be removed from your ‘to do’ list.
4. Create a fancy PowerPoint visualization
ChatGPT’s AI powers combine well with another OpenAI creation, Dall-E, which went viral last year before the chatbot. A powerful text-to-image generator, Dall-E can create visualizations (with mixed results) from simple prompts – which can be a very helpful way to jazz up your PowerPoint presentation.
According to a report from The Information (opens in a new tab), Microsoft internally discussed “plans to allow PowerPoint customers to use OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 image generation model to create new visuals for presentations”. This can work in conjunction with ChatGPT’s ability to summarize pieces of text with bullet point summaries, effectively creating draft presentations for you.
This visual aid is what Adobe refers to as a “creative co-pilot”, allowing you to simply describe what you want to add to a scene or image. While it has big ramifications for digital art, it can also be a lot less time-consuming to make a PowerPoint presentation.
5. Turning on Excel
Not everyone loves spending time in Microsoft Excel, but ChatGPT’s data analysis and question-answering powers could make the spreadsheet tool more novice-friendly.
The Reddit forums are already lit up with the ways people have found to connect ChatGPT to Excel (see the video below). And Microsoft’s massive investment in OpenAI promises to integrate those skills directly into apps like Microsoft’s spreadsheet king.
It could, for example, pull in data based on a simple prompt (“list the top five companies in the world by profit”), create Excel formulas and Macros, or make data visualization charts for you.
A chatbot that lives inside Excel, ready to analyze data and help you with visualization, was a huge help for beginners, and a huge time saver for experienced users, too.
