Relately: I've noticed that if I use ChatGPT in Microsoft Edge, I get (sometimes very) helpful co-pilot style completions in the input text area. Is that an Edge-exclusive feature? And how does CopilotKit compare?
I didn't know ChatGPT + Edge did that, pretty cool!
And yes, with CopilotKit you can implement the same to any text area in any app, that would work on any browser (+ other key features).
I can tell you that CopilotTextarea works very, very well if you give it the right context - but since I hadn't known about Edge's feature, I can't compare.
Even long term, I think this is functionality that will be better offered by the app itself rather than the browser - bc the app can control the relevant context beyond what's visible on the screen (e.g. RAG on users' backend state), customize the prompt, and potentially even design dedicated LLM chains (as needed).
I now think it's likely I misunderstood what the feature involves and that it is actually way more limited than I thought compared to CopilotKit (perhaps it's little different from Gmail's Smart Compose), but this is a quick-and-dirty screenshot:
This looks like a very rudimentary completion, almost Markov chain level. I don't think it requires sending user data to any remote servers, it could have easily been done on the client.
Funny you find those useful, I disabled them fairly quickly.
That said, prior to disabling them I’d actually use it the opposite way: If I’m entering prose into a box and the AI has a very good understanding of what I’m about to say, that’s a good indication I’m not saying anything remotely interesting and I should either change direction or abandon my comment entirely.
> > Well it’s kind of misleading, because GitHub has kind of a following for their product named Copilot.
> Microsoft also has an AI feature called Copilot. I think at this point the name has become a generic term for AI assistance.
Github is Microsoft, and, yes, Microsoft has expanded their Copilot branding for end-user-facing AI assistance beyond just the Github coding tool, but that doesn't make it generic.
It'd be nice if this was more clearly labeled as a React plugin. I saw "drop in replacement for <textarea>" and thought it was a web component and only realized it was a react plugin after reading further. Not a huge deal, but since it is a plugin and not a stand-alone thing it might make sense to make that clear up front.
We're starting with react web, planning to expand from there to other surfaces, including React Native.
I suspect the gap from the current version, to React Native support is rather small. It's open-source, so feel free to open an issue so that it can get upvoted/prioritized, (or even better, you can work on it too ;) )
And Pretty much!
You have to wrap the app (or the part you want copilot in) with a <CopilotProvider /> - this is UI-agnostic, business logic only.
Then there are a few customizable UI providers you can use, or you can just build your own if needed.
If you check it out do let me know what you think!
Now that it’s firmly entrenched as Microsoft branding you may want to reconsider. Soon, people searching for “AI Copilot” aren’t going to be able to find you.
Microsoft is using the Copilot term everywhere - in GitHub, Visual Studio, all the Office apps etc. They have rebranded the Power Platform Virtual Agents builder as "Copilot Studio", and chatbots in your projects are known as copilots.
I would be very surprised if you didn't receive legal challenge to your use of the name, if you grow in popularity.
Any chatbot/AI that i can't say "please refund this order due to product being damaged here is a pic" and it can't do a refund on its own is worthless. Not because i care about refunds, but if the bot can't do that, chances are it can't do anything real and its just trained on a bunch of docs and is worthless otherwise.
It's also 10x worse when the website has a green circle on it like teams/zoom showing it as "online" and makes you feel like you are actually talking to someone.
Obviously we'll let customers decide how to deploy this tech, but our vision is less about "chat with AI customer support", and more "tap into intelligence to help you achieve your task".
I personally fell in love with copilots when all my engineering tools started adding them (e.g. Cursor IDE, Warp terminal, etc.).
And really, I wanted to tap into artificial intelligence everywhere, from excel to planning a vacation in AirBnb. "is this a good place to stay with a young kid?"
Just in recent months, the market has validated this intuition, e.g. Microsoft Copilot products (think 2nd-brain-on-tap for e.g. PowerPoint, not support chat) have boosted productivity by 30%, with lots of other impressive metrics
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If you do go back to the customer support use-case,
I'd see the support agent's software using CopilotTextarea, to let them reply to 10x more messages, but where they still drive the conversation.
Though I could see it coupled with AI chatbot on the consumer side, where it makes sense
It should not be cumbersome to enter your query and be suggested a solution before being connected to a human. In some cases the suggestion will resolve the problem, relieving the load on responders.
but having been on the other side, requests like yours are the exception. support chatbots relieve a huge load, allowing the real people to work on real requests like yours rather than the numerous junk ones.
Chat interface is used to talk to people. If you talk to a machine, there is no point to mimic human behaviour, especially when current iterations of AI can't reason. There should be a better way to do this.
Like 90% of the time I want to chat to customer rep, because I want to let them now there were missing items in the delivery and I want re-delivery or refund. That could be a simple expert system with a few buttons. But businesses want to discourage people from returning anything, so they are building those time wasting widgets hoping a % of people give up.
Like if my time costs £200 per hour and the wrong delivery was worth £50, I am not going to spend more than 15 minutes on this, unless it is critical to the business.
This has nothing to do with helping customers, but to save money.
I responded to a sibling comment of yours about the chat aspect (TL;DR: our key objective is very far from human customer support - more similar to "chat with your codebase" if you use e.g. Cursor IDE).
But I think you do bring an interesting point, that chat interface is just one type of way to talk to computers, and in some sense it's the "laziest" way, since it's what we use to talk to people now.
The Textarea is actually an example of another non-chat way to "talk" to the AI intelligence. I do think we'll see a lot more being discovered by the community over the next 2 years (and we'll build those into CopilotKit, of course)
It feels like MS is already treating it like a generic term. I think I saw a Kevin Scott article recently where he kept referring to "copilots" as well. The term is being so widely used right now that they'd need to defend it quickly if they even have a trademark. (Looking at the USPTO database, MS applied for a trademark for "Microsoft Copilot" in September then filed an express abandonment a few days later.)
That said the concept of a copilot is pretty generic, so hopefully we can peacefully coexist.
They've doubled down on the Copilot naming after the project was well underway, and I don't really want to rename it in anticipation of trouble that may never materialize
It's an airline term, I am not a lawyer at all but I feel like there's an argument somewhere that using it as a brand for an intelligent/computer assistant, or, fine if you want to be buzzwordy, AI assistant on a computer is a novel use.
A bit like "Apple". If you open a computer store named Apple, I think you can't get away with the argument that "It's a term from the agriculture industry!".
Microsoft recently rebranded their chatbot offering to Copilot Studio. Copilot is also the name of Microsoft's AI products.
It's hard enough keeping all of Microsoft's products with similar names straight. I don't want to confuse other products with them, too, unless, maybe, this is the point :)
