Microsoft Copilot review covering free chat, Copilot Pro and Premium tiers, image generation, voice mode, and how it compares to ChatGPT and Gemini.
Microsoft Copilot is the company's consumer AI chat assistant, reachable directly at copilot.microsoft.com and built into Windows, Bing, and Microsoft Edge. It grew out of Bing Chat, the GPT-4-powered chatbot Microsoft added to Bing search on February 7, 2023, and was unified under the Copilot brand in late 2023.
Copilot is separate from Microsoft 365 Copilot (the enterprise productivity assistant embedded in Word, Excel, and Teams) and GitHub Copilot (a developer coding assistant), even though all three share the Copilot name and underlying AI technology.
The core experience is a conversational chat interface that can answer questions, draft and summarize text, and browse the live web to ground answers in current information. Copilot also generates images from text prompts, offers a voice mode for spoken conversation, and includes Copilot Vision, which can analyze on-screen content or a camera feed to answer questions about what it sees.
In 2026, Microsoft added the ability to select alternate underlying models inside Copilot Chat, including Anthropic's Claude, for tasks like document understanding and structured content generation, alongside its default OpenAI-based models. A newer agentic mode, sometimes referred to as Cowork, can carry out multi-step tasks across a user's data rather than answering a single prompt at a time.
The core Microsoft Copilot experience at copilot.microsoft.com is free to anyone with a Microsoft account, including standard chat, web-grounded answers, and limited image generation. Microsoft previously sold a standalone Copilot Pro subscription at $20 per month for individuals wanting faster responses and deeper app integration, but retired it in late 2025 in favor of folding those capabilities into Microsoft 365 subscription tiers.
Consumers who want the advanced features that used to require Copilot Pro can now get them through Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, or Premium plans, with Premium (around $19.99 per month) offering the fullest AI feature set. Separately, Microsoft 365 Copilot for business and enterprise customers is priced at roughly $30 per user per month as an add-on to a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan, and is a distinct product from the consumer Copilot covered here.
Yes, the core Copilot experience at copilot.microsoft.com is free with a Microsoft account, including chat, web-grounded answers, and limited image generation.
Microsoft Copilot is a general-purpose consumer chat assistant, while Microsoft 365 Copilot is a separate, separately priced product embedded inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams for enterprise productivity tasks.
No. GitHub Copilot is a code-completion assistant for developers inside code editors, while Microsoft Copilot is a general chat assistant for everyday tasks and questions.
Microsoft retired the standalone $20 per month Copilot Pro subscription in late 2025; existing subscribers can keep using it until August 1, 2026, after which advanced features move into Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, and Premium plans.
Copilot is built primarily on OpenAI's GPT model family, and in 2026 Microsoft added the option to select alternate models, including Anthropic's Claude, within Copilot Chat.
It started as Bing Chat, launched February 7, 2023 as part of the redesigned Bing search engine, and was renamed Copilot at Microsoft Ignite in November 2023.