Microsoft Word has already received many AI-powered enhancements with Microsoft’s Copilot assistant. Now, there’s one more improvement rolling out for Copilot’s summarization feature.
You can now summarize documents in Word containing up to roughly 80,000 words, depending on the language, using the Copilot feature. That’s about four times higher than the previous limit, giving you more context in longer documents.
Microsoft announced in a blog post, “One of the most used Copilot features in Word is Summarize this doc. To improve the experience, our goal has been to support longer document summarization, and your feedback confirmed that it was important to our customers as well. We’re excited to make this happen!”
You can try out the feature by opening the Copilot button in the Home tab of Word’s ribbon bar, then typing “Summarize this doc” in the chat box. Copilot will give you a summarized version of the entire document, though if a certain detail is important, you’ll probably want to check it yourself—this is still generative AI, and it might get some information wrong.
Copilot features in Word and other Office apps requires a Copilot Pro subscription, in addition to your regular Microsoft 365 subscription. That also includes access to the GPT-4 Turbo language model and faster responses in Copilot, and faster image generation in Microsoft Designer and Copilot. Copilot Pro costs $20 per month per user in the United States.
Microsoft also just started rolling out better Copilot writing tools in Word. You can now select segments of your document and ask Copilot to rewrite it in any style.
The new summarization feature is available in Microsoft Word version 2310 (build 16919.20000) or later on Windows, Word version 16.78 (build 23082801) or later on Mac, Word version 16.0.16827.10000 on Android, and Word version 2.78 on iPhone and iPad.
Source: Microsoft 365 Insider Blog
