Copilot Chat in Outlook now works with your emails and calendar

Until recently, Copilot Chat answers drew mainly on web information or on files you uploaded yourself. In Outlook, Microsoft has since broadened what it can do. Copilot Chat can now take additional information from your working context into account – from emails, calendar entries or meetings. Answers are often more precise and more useful as a result.

 

Info Value: Less time spent searching
Use case Use case: Questions across sources
Reading time Reading time:
4 minutes
Difficulty Difficulty: Beginner

The change makes Copilot Chat in Outlook considerably more interesting for everyday information lookup. Instead of working through individual emails, meetings and appointments by hand, you can put the question to Copilot Chat directly.

It helps most with topics that are spread across several messages, meetings or people. Copilot Chat can pull that material together and give you an overview far more quickly.

  • Example 1 – Summarising a longer exchange: Rather than reading through a lengthy thread yourself, you can ask Copilot Chat: Summarise the emails from Ms Berger over the past four weeks about the Customer Portal project. The result is a compact summary that gets you to the current state of play faster.
  • Example 2 – Connecting information from several sources: Information is often spread across emails, meetings and calendar entries. You might ask, for instance: Summarise the meeting with Ms Meyer on 15 July and the emails about the framework agreement from the week that followed. The relevant pieces are brought together and laid out clearly.
  • Example 3 – Catching up after leave or illness: After a longer absence, messages and appointments tend to pile up. A question such as Summarise the emails and meetings from 1 to 14 July. gives you a quick overview of the important developments and decisions.
  • Be as specific as you can.
  • Name people, projects, date ranges or the terms that matter.
  • The more precise the question, the better Copilot Chat can locate the right information.
  • Check important results against the original source where it matters.
  • Where completeness matters – all the decisions on a topic, say – check the result against your mailbox directly.
  • The expansion applies to Copilot Chat in Outlook. In other Microsoft 365 applications, the scope remains unchanged for now.

The expansion makes Copilot Chat in Outlook noticeably more useful. For research, for summaries and for getting a quick overview of ongoing topics in particular, Copilot Chat in Outlook now offers considerably better support than before. For a lot of everyday tasks, that means less searching and faster access to the information that matters.