Microsoft Word writing coach is now available

Faesol Ogungbayi Education, Technology 11/10/2024

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Coaching with Copilot—Microsoft’s newest weapon in its AI arsenal in Word—takes the writer’s work and fine-tunes it to make it clearer, more effective, better organized, and in tune with its reader.

Microsoft reported that the tool that goes way beyond spelling and grammar identifies your’muddled’ ideas, suggests improvements and changes in writing, and guides you on creating the best-language tone for your audience.

You can get feedback about the entire paper or about a single paragraph that may sound not quite correct. To use Coaching with Copilot, just choose the part of the code you want Copilot to analyze, click on the Copilot icon, and then click “Get Coaching.” If you would like to use keys on the keyboard, use Shift+Arrows to highlight some of the parts of the paragraph (or Ctrl+Shift+Arrows to highlight an entire paragraph), Alt + i to open the Copilot window, and then use the Arrow keys to get to “Get Coaching,” then the Enter button.

When you are ready to use the tool, click the arrows to view the feedback given and the various recommendations about the typed text.

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If you are okay with having an AI generate your work and then submit it as your own, Microsoft Word should ideally allow you to pick a particular suggestion and incorporate it directly into your text. However, this functionality is missing, and so we can only rewrite the work manually based on the coaching tips, or simply highlight the comments and then cut and paste into the Draft With Copilot tool so that Word will rewrite the work based on what the tool has suggested. According to Microsoft, the “direct ability to apply these suggestions from the Coaching dialog… is coming soon.”

Microsoft competes fiercely with other services and software on the market that aim to be as effective a generative AI tool. Currently, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is said to have 180+ million users, and Grammarly explains that it is “used by 30+ million people, 70,000 companies and teams, and 96% of Fortune 500 companies.” Other new writing assistants are also growing in popularity—ffor example, LanguageTool has over 2 million installations due to its start in 2003.

Before you can use Microsoft Coaching with Copilot, you have to have bought a Copilot license, be in Word for the web in English, be in the United States, and have English selected as your computer language. Microsoft is already implementing this feature for people who consider these requirements and aims to bring this feature to other language users and nations in the following months.

Source: Microsoft