How to Use Microsoft Copilot Free: Chat, Voice & Files (Full Transcript)

[00:00:01] Speaker 1: Are you looking to get started or get up to date with Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant? Well, I'm Nick, and I'm gonna show you how you can use Copilot completely for free right now to get answers using Copilot's AI chat, talk to Copilot using your natural voice, generate drafts of text, create pictures, or use Copilot to analyze information from documents that you provide. I'll even share some tips for writing better prompts to get more effective responses from Copilot. This video just focuses on the free version of Copilot. There are more feature-rich versions available if you upgrade to Microsoft 365. You can purchase your own subscription as an individual, or some people use a Microsoft 365 account managed by their employer, company, or a similar organization. I actually have a full training course covering that version here on this channel. The link is in the description. But in this video, we're going to get started right now with the free version. You can start by going to copilot.microsoft.com. There is a Copilot chat field, and there's a sidebar on the left that you can expand with a few more options. In the chat field, you can type a message directly to Copilot, almost like sending a text message to a friend. So let's start with a basic question. I'll ask, what's the longest river in North America? Pretty straightforward question. And we get an answer with some additional details. Now you can continue with this conversation and ask a follow-up question. I'll ask, what about South America? It remembers that I was asking about rivers, so it remembers that context and answers the question. So you can continue an ongoing conversation like this, keep asking questions, and sometimes Copilot will even ask you questions to clarify what you need. But if you click the new chat button at the top, it will reset that context, and you can start a new topic. I'll ask Copilot a slightly more complex question. I'll ask it to help me identify the best locations for real estate development in Arizona. With a more complex question, we get more information. Now on the left, Copilot keeps each of these separate conversations saved. So if I wanna go back to that other conversation about rivers, I can select that and continue. But so far, I have not signed into an account in Copilot. If you don't sign in, Copilot has no way to remember who you are, and it will not save your conversation history forever. At the bottom, there is a sign-in button. This will link your identity to Copilot so it can store your chat history. And if you sign in on multiple computers or devices, that chat history will be available on all of those devices. And if you don't have an account, you can choose Microsoft and you can create a new free Microsoft account here. I'll sign in with my Microsoft account. And back in Copilot, of course your saved chats are listed on the left. You can open a menu on each one and there's an option to delete them. But I'll select the conversation about real estate development. And one big rule to remember is that Copilot finds information from the internet. So that information may not always be completely accurate. To help with this, Copilot uses citations. You won't always see these, but usually in more complex responses, you will see the citations. You can point at one to see where Copilot found this information, or you can click on it to actually go to that website. Of course, I do not check citations for most basic questions but for important research, you can follow the links from the citations and make sure that the source information is accurate. Moving on, you can type your requests in the chat field, but you can also talk with Copilot. There's a talk button in the chat field. And when you click that, it will use your computer's microphone and you can talk normally. Hi there, Nick. Hey Copilot, should I leave my laptop plugged in all the time or should I only plug it in when the battery is low?

[00:04:06] Speaker 2: Absolutely, let's dive into that. So what I found is it's generally not a good idea to keep your laptop plugged in all the time and fully charged.

[00:04:16] Speaker 1: Just make sure to close this when you want it to stop listening to you. You could keep the conversation going, which is a great hands-free way to use Copilot, but if you do stop, it will show the request and the responses in text form. Now, aside from answering questions, let's explore some of the other things that Copilot can do. You may have heard the term generative AI. Copilot can actually generate new content. You might ask it to help you draft some text. I'll tell Copilot to draft an email that informs a client that they're late with a payment. And that gives me text, which I could copy and paste into an email. But you can also follow up and ask for changes. You can ask Copilot to add specific information or change the tone. So I could tell Copilot to change the tone to be more friendly and remind them that they have not missed a payment in over 10 years. And we'll see that revision. Copilot can also generate pictures. I'll tell Copilot to make a picture of a suburban house with solar panels on the roof on a bright sunny day. This will take some time, and then it gives me a picture. Of course, I can ask for changes to the picture as a follow-up request. So I might say, how would this look at night with an electric car in the driveway? It takes some time, then gives me the updated picture. You can even combine elements from different pictures. I'll drag a picture of myself to the chat field, then tell it to add me to the scene. And once you have a picture you like, there's a button to download the final picture. Or you can choose the library option on the left to see the library of all of the pictures that Copilot has generated for you. So you can always go back and download them later. Of course, this only works if you are signed into an account. Now, a moment ago, I dragged a picture into the chat field. So you can drag pictures or documents directly into the Copilot chat field and ask Copilot to analyze them for you. Or you can click the plus button and upload files that way. So I'll upload a spreadsheet with a product inventory. And I'll ask, which are the top five items with the highest profit margin? And Copilot does that analysis for me. Now that's just one quick example, but you can ask much more complex questions to analyze the content in your documents. Which actually brings us to the last thing I wanted to dive into here. We've asked some fairly simple questions just to see how the system works. But Copilot can handle much more complex questions. The trick is for you as the user to write more powerful requests. Sometimes new users can have a hard time thinking of what types of questions to ask or what to use Copilot for. When you start a new chat, there are some suggested prompts below the chat field. These are tasks that Microsoft knows Copilot can help with. You can try some of these to start getting an idea of what works. But you may also want to try some techniques for writing better prompts yourself. There's a concept called prompt engineering. There are lots of resources available on prompt engineering, including several books. Of course, I recommend you do some research and learn more about that. But for now, I want to kind of simplify this so you have some tools to start writing better prompts right now. And it starts with identifying different components in a good prompt. Components like role, goal, context, expectations, and sources. These components are not the whole story, but let's just start with these. Earlier, I asked Copilot for information about real estate development in Arizona. Let's write a better version of that question using these components. To start, I might write, you are an urban developer with 20 years of experience. I'm giving Copilot a role. I want it to answer questions the way that person would answer questions. Next, I'll tell it I want it to identify locations that may benefit from retail and community-based redevelopment. This is my goal. The more detail you can offer in the goal, the more likely Copilot will find information to achieve that goal. Next, I can tell Copilot, your recommendations will focus mainly, but not exclusively on the American Southwest region. I need to be aware of available resources, tax incentives, and government oversight. This is important context. If I only want answers related to Arizona, I can specify that. If I want to expand to the Southwest region, I can specify that. Context gives scope to your request. Next, I'll tell Copilot to give me detailed responses, but finish each response with a concise overview of the information in a bulleted list. These are my expectations. Telling Copilot what I want and how I want it formatted. Some people would identify the format and the tone as separate components, and that can be helpful, but I've rolled that into my expectations here. Finally, consider sources, if you have any. If you just want Copilot to find whatever information it can from the internet, you don't have to worry about sources. But if there are specific websites you want it to refer to, then tell Copilot that in the prompt. If you have specific documents or pictures you want Copilot to use as sources, be sure to add those. Using all of these components, we have a longer but much more effective prompt. I have that full prompt written here and ready to go, including all of those components, and it finishes with the original question I wanted to ask. It certainly can take more time to write a robust prompt that uses each of these components, but let's see the results that Copilot gives me. I think I got much more detailed and extensive results here. And you don't always have to use every component. Just use the components that you think will be most helpful for your task. We've also established valuable context here, so I can continue in this chat with follow-up questions and more requests, which will all be addressed according to the context that I've set. And we've only scratched the surface of prompt engineering here, but I think you can try writing prompts with these components, and you'll get much more detailed information from Copilot. And we did all of this with the completely free version of Copilot. I'd like to think you now have a good foundation to start working. And one thing that I'd like you to remember is that Copilot changes constantly. The core features that you've seen here should be stable for a while, but you might see some new features or changes to the interface over time. Just be ready for things to shift a little. And be sure to subscribe to this channel for more videos like this.