Overview

Microsoft Copilot is developed by Microsoft and is included in the university’s Microsoft 365 subscription for students, faculty, and staff.

Microsoft Copilot logo

There are many different variations of “Microsoft Copilot” for the different consumer, corporate, and education industries that Microsoft has customers in. At Quinnipiac, we have the Microsoft 365 Copilot version of Copilot. Not all features that are in the consumer version of Copilot are available in our version.

Copilot is a generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool powered by OpenAI’s LLM and DALL-E 3 (image generation). In response to prompts, Copilot can generate content like text, images, or tables. Prompts given to Copilot can be typed text or uploaded files (PDFs, Word documents, CSVs, etc.). After giving a response, Copilot will prompt you with next questions to ask in the conversation, give the sources that the responses came from, and allow you to “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” a response to indicate your satisfaction.

A screenshot of a conversation thread in Microsoft Copilot, with messages from the user and Copilot.

A screenshot of a Copilot conversation where Copilot has extracted the text from an image and created an Excel table, replicating the image’s table.

A screenshot of four images related to Quinnipiac generated by Copilot

Additionally, Copilot now features the ability to have a chat history, so you can reference or continue conversations in the future.

A screenshot of Microsoft Copilot’s user interface, highlighting the “New chat” option and the sidebar icon, to open the chat history in the top right tools.

Microsoft is continuously developing Copilot and new features are being released all the time. For the latest Copilot updates, check out Microsoft’s updates page. →

Explore ways to use Copilot →

Accessing Copilot

Students, faculty, and staff can access Microsoft Copilot using their Microsoft 365 credentials.

Open the Copilot home page and select the purple “Sign in” button. Note: Copilot works best in Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome browsers. If you have ad blockers enabled, disable them or use a private/incognito window if Copilot doesn’t function as expected.

Screenshot of the Microsoft Copilot “Sign in” button

If you’re already signed in to Microsoft 365, you will be taken to Copilot and can begin chatting. If you are not signed in to Microsoft 365, you will be presented with a sign-in screen where you will enter username@quinnipiac.edu and sign in as you usually would.

Copilot is available in the Apple and Google app stores through the Microsoft 365 app.

Microsoft 365 in Apple’s App Store →

Microsoft 365 in Google’s Play Store →

Information Security

To ensure you’re in the authenticated version of Copilot that’s provided by the University, make sure your user photo appears in the top right of Copilot and when you select the shield icon, you see the message about Enterprise data protection (shown below).