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This review first appeared in issue 355 of PC Pro.

There are three key features in Copilot for Outlook: summarization, drafting and coaching. Summarization is probably the feature you’ll encounter first, as every email you receive has a prominent “Summary by Copilot” bar at the top.

Click on this, and it creates a short, easy-to-read summary of the key points in the email. How useful this will be depends on the kind of mail you get. But if you spend a long time reading complex emails and trying to work out what the point is, you’ll love it.

The second main feature, drafting, is like the drafting feature in Word, in that you give it a prompt and it writes the email for you. You can vary the tone using pop-up options – direct, neutral, casual, formal or, erm, “make it a poem” – and set the length as short, medium or long. Beware: Outlook uses the last tone you selected, so if you do decide to write a poem, remember to change it before drafting an email to your accountant.

As with Word, I’d categorize the results as “something to start with and personalize” rather than the finished article. Tonally, it veers towards the extreme: formal is very formal, and casual is probably fine for sending to family and close friends only. In my tests, direct produced the best results, although some of its phrases required toning down to stop them sounding like the kind of email you get from the bailiffs chasing you for a late payment.

My favorite feature is coaching. This checks the content of an email you’ve written and gives you tips on how to improve it, with clear advice that’s actually useful. It advised me to make my tone more confident, which professional writing coaches have told me in the past.

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Ian has been writing about technology for more than 20 years, which is long enough for his original focus – Apple – to have gone from “five days from bankruptcy” to “biggest company in the world”. Since then he’s managed magazines, websites, apps, YouTube channels, Facebook pages and pretty much every other kind of medium there is. He’s interested in mobile technology, from laptops to phones via tablets and smartwatches, along with the cloud and startups.

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