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To mark its 50th anniversary, Microsoft is giving its AI-powered Copilot chatbot a significant upgrade — one that promises to make it far more capable and contextually aware.
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Copilot can now perform tasks on most websites, according to Microsoft, including booking tickets, making restaurant reservations, and completing other everyday online actions. This enhancement moves Copilot into the realm of “agentic AI” — tools that can take meaningful action on users’ behalf online — aligning it with capabilities seen in tools like OpenAI’s Operator.
The chatbot has also gained a memory function, allowing it to recall user-specific preferences such as favorite foods, movies, and other personal details. This positions it more competitively against rivals like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, both of which have expanded aggressively in recent months.
A More Active Digital Assistant
As of this week, Copilot can interact with a number of popular platforms out of the box. Microsoft says it has partnered with services like 1-800-Flowers.com, Booking.com, Expedia, Kayak, OpenTable, Priceline, Tripadvisor, Skyscanner, Viator, and Vrbo. This means that prompts like “send a bouquet to my partner” could now result in Copilot completing that task directly.
In addition, Copilot can monitor prices and notify users of sales or discounts — similar to features found in Perplexity’s search engine. For example, users can ask the bot to track price drops on a product and receive alerts when a deal becomes available.
However, Microsoft hasn’t shared detailed performance metrics or limitations of this new functionality. It’s also likely that some websites could block Copilot, as they’ve done with similar tools like OpenAI’s Operator, due to concerns about traffic redirection and potential ad revenue loss.
Enhanced Real-Time Capabilities
Beyond web actions, Copilot’s new visual intelligence allows it to analyze real-time video from your phone’s camera or photo gallery. Users can ask contextual questions such as “What’s this flower?” and receive immediate responses.
On Windows, the refreshed Copilot app can interact with content on your desktop — from adjusting settings and organizing files to launching searches. This capability will begin rolling out to Windows Insider program members next week.
While this opens up powerful new functionality, it also raises questions around privacy and safety. Microsoft has yet to elaborate on the safeguards in place to prevent accidental file access or critical system changes.
Audio and Research Features Expand
In a move echoing Google’s NotebookLM, Copilot can now generate AI-generated audio overviews — short, podcast-like segments between synthetic hosts based on websites, studies, or other inputs. Users can interrupt at any point to ask questions, and the AI hosts will respond conversationally.
Copilot also introduces “Pages,” a new tool for organizing research and notes on a digital canvas — similar to ChatGPT’s Canvas or Claude’s Artifacts. Paired with “Deep Research,” Copilot can now aggregate and analyze content from the web, documents, and images to handle more sophisticated information requests.
Personalization and User Control
Perhaps most notably, Copilot can now remember and adapt to user preferences over time. This enables more personalized assistance, including tailored suggestions, reminders, and proactive help. However, Microsoft emphasizes user control: memory settings can be managed via the Copilot dashboard, with options to delete individual memories or opt out entirely.
“You remain in control,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post shared with TechCrunch. “Copilot gives you the ability to choose which information it remembers or to opt out completely.”
