Microsoft’s latest AI chatbot, Microsoft Copilot, has just been made available to download for iOS and iPadOS. If you feel the need for another AI tool to tinker with, both can be downloaded from the App Store for free right now.
Microsoft Copilot (which was originally known as Bing Chat) is very similar to ChatGPT, and the other chatbots that litter the web. You put in your prompt — whether that's a question or a request for help penning an email or summary — and it'll spit out what's required. Copilot can also generate images from text due to an integration with the text-to-image generator, DALL-E3.
Interestingly, Copilot is capable of running GPT-4, which is shorthand for generative pretrained transformer. It's the software that allows the AI to generate human-like responses, and to accept both text and image inputs. For reference, the free version of ChatGPT currently makes use of GPT-3.5.
This isn’t the only difference between the two. Microsoft Copilot limits how many responses a user can make in a thread to around thirty. It'll also not allow access to image generation without creating an account. However, while testing both out it seemed Copilot was willing to give far longer answers to each question I offered. ChatGPT seemed to offer more human-like answers and felt less like it was just searching the web for responses.
Currently, it appears Copilot does not save any threads for you and you are unable to upload files other than photos. However, this is a vast improvement over ChatGPT which makes analyzing a photo far more complex than it needs to be.
I didn’t find much difference in speed when using either app. Both Copilot and ChatGPT were fast in their responses, although ChatGPT was slightly quicker. Finally, I asked both to compose an email to a distant friend asking to catch up. Microsoft Copilot responded with a template filled with options to help personalize the response from me, meanwhile, ChatGPT didn't offer alternative options but had a better composition.
It seems there are benefits to both apps at the moment, but there is nothing that would help to push one ahead of the other on Apple’s products. The biggest hindrance for Copilot is the limit on responses, which may be changed in the future if the app sees more use.
