Joel VannerMicrosoft Copilot
Overview
Microsoft Copilot is developed by Microsoft and is included in the university’s Microsoft 365 subscription for students, faculty, and staff.
Note: 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 GPT-4o 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.
Additionally, Copilot now features the ability to have a chat history, so you can reference or continue conversations in the future.
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. →
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.
- 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.
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).
Read more about Copilot’s commercial data protection →
Links & Resources
Learn more about Copilot prompts, which you can use to tell Copilot what you want →
