‘Draft with Copilot’ is an AI-powered feature introduced to Edge relatively recently, with the web browser being one of the first avenues where Microsoft pushed its Copilot AI assistant, and soon, it could be getting a minor upgrade.
Trusted watcher of all things browser-related, Leopeva64, spotted the new development and highlighted it on X, sharing some screenshots (and animated GIFs) of the new ‘Draft with Copilot’ ability which is part of an Edge Canary preview build.
In Edge Canary there is a new "Draft with Copilot" entry that appears in the context menu of editable text fields when they are empty, if the field already contains text, the new entry doesn't appear:https://t.co/aao0ullCQD.https://t.co/96Qc0JWjf5 pic.twitter.com/430YAAujAYJuly 19, 2024
As you might guess, the feature enlists the help of the AI to craft some text for you, and the addition here is that it’s now available when you right-click an empty text field in Edge. When you fire up ‘Draft with Copilot’ in such an empty field, it opens a window for the AI assistant, and here you can enter the subject that you’d like Copilot to compose some text about.
You can then click ‘Generate’ and watch Copilot work its magic as the AI whips up a piece of text on the topic you chose. When Copilot has provided its offering, you can subsequently modify the tone and length of Copilot’s text to better fit your purpose, or just play around with possible tweaks.
Right now, the feature is only supported in US English in the Edge browser, but in time, I’d expect this will open up to further languages.
The second GIF that Leopeva64 posted shows an interesting twist to the new update. Seemingly when you right-click on an editable text field with text already in it, the ‘Draft with Copilot’ option is not available. While this could change during testing, presumably it’s this way because there’s already text present, so you wouldn’t want to be drafting something from scratch.
Copilot as a co-author
MS Power User, which spotted this development, points out that the concept is similar to Google Chrome’s ‘Help Me Write’ feature, and I’d agree.
Microsoft has previously written a blog post about Copilot’s creative composition abilities when working with text fields, describing how you can use the AI to “quickly generate well-written text to use as input text in text boxes” and further noting: “Using Copilot saves time because you won’t have to worry about creating text that meets grammar rules. Copilot is especially helpful for users who are using apps that aren’t in their native language.”
One thing to consider carefully is the quality of the text that Copilot produces. Critics of AI-generated text in general complain that it can seem very generic and read in a toneless, bland, way - and that could be a problem if you’re going for something to try and grab the attention of readers.
Still, the particular implementation here is more about knocking up something concise in swift order, right there in the browser, and Copilot is likely to do a more serviceable job in that respect, or what it generates could work as a useful jumping-off point that you can expand on - or it’ll give you some further ideas.
Whatever the case, Copilot is slowly making its way into different corners of more Windows apps, including Edge, that much is clear.
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