Microsoft was an early entrant in the AI chatbot race, launching Bing Chat in February in hopes of boosting the lagging search engine. Unfortunately, their strategy doesn’t seem to have moved much, and Bing’s growth has been pretty flat throughout the year. Now, it looks like the Redmond Giants are trying something new.
Bing Chat has been rebranded to Copilot and integrated into many Microsoft products, including Edge and Windows 11. But mobile was an afterthought, with no direct way to access Copilot, requiring you to download the Edge or Bing app. As a frequent user of Copilot (which is basically his GPT-4 which is free!), I always thought it would be really useful to have a dedicated app so I didn’t have to launch Edge every time. Ask well and you shall receive – the Copilot app is finally here on Android.
what is the app like
If you’ve already used Copilot with web forms, you’ll feel immediately familiar with the mobile app. Get started using the same messaging-style interface and sample prompts. But what’s really great about it is that compared to Copilot web integrations like Edge search and Bing search, everything seems to run smoother and more responsively. Operations like clearing chat history and starting fresh are very fast, and the overall experience is very polished. Beyond the sleek interface, the app offers all the core features you’d expect, including email, document creation, and even AI-generated images with Dall-E 3 integration.
Where ChatGPT apps still win
With over 10 million downloads, the ChatGPT app is arguably Copilot’s biggest competitor, even though Copilot’s makers are more allies than competitors. The main advantage of ChatGPT today is speed. Responses are usually immediate, regardless of length or complexity. On the other hand, Copilot can be slow and take time to understand the prompt and search for additional context before creating a response. Once the output is generated, it will be delivered line by line over a few seconds.
Copilot also has a 4,000 character limit, which makes it difficult to digest large documents quickly unless you break them into smaller chunks. ChatGPT has much higher limits. ChatGPT also recently added a nifty voice chat feature. This is no exaggeration and is designed to make you feel like you’re talking to a real human during a call.
Copilot, on the other hand, has a less fancy voice input mode, where you tap the microphone to convert your voice to text, and the robot’s voice reads out the AI’s responses.
So why use Copilot?
If ChatGPT is so great, why bother switching to Copilot? The biggest perks are free web access and GPT-4. GPT-4 is a significant improvement over GPT-3.5, producing much more subtle and accurate responses. Hallucinations are also less likely to occur. Overall, I found Copilot’s answers to be much more trustworthy.
Plus, there’s the fact that Copilot has access to the entire Internet, so you can ask questions about current events. For example, if you ask his free ChatGPT, “What’s the most powerful iPhone?” he’ll probably answer the 2021 iPhone 13 Pro Max. But Copilot answers correctly. Answer “iPhone 15 Pro Max”. Similarly, you’ll see prompts like “What’s in the news today?” Unlike his ChatGPT app which is free, ‘What is the cheapest flight from Delhi to Mumbai’ is actually useful. Of course, you can also buy ChatGPT Plus, but at around Rs 2,000 per month, it’s not cheap.
Copilot also allows you to generate images directly from chats, which is not possible at all with the free ChatGPT. And finally, Copilot gives you more control by adjusting the tone of your responses between creative, balanced, and precise.
conclusion
In a nutshell, think of Copilot as a poor man’s ChatGPT Plus. ChatGPT Plus is still great for power users, but if you don’t want to pay and don’t mind Copilot’s slower speeds, you can replace His ChatGPT with His Copilot on your home screen like I did.
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Originally uploaded to: Dec 27, 2023 14:14 IST