Your first task with Copilot
By the end of this you will have asked your copilot for something you actually needed, watched it work through the steps, and know what a task costs and where to look when it needs one of your apps.
Open a conversation and ask
Everything in Copilot happens inside a conversation. There is nothing to set up before the first one: you open it, you type, and it starts.
Open Copilot
Open Copilot from the main navigation, then choose the link that opens a conversation. You can also go directly to /copilot/conversation.
Start a new conversation
Select New conversation at the top of the list on the left. Everything you have ever started stays in that list, so you can walk away from a task and come back to it.
Take an example, or write your own
Use a suggestion if one fits, or write your own request in the message box. Suggestions and their wording can differ between the conversation views and languages.
Send it
Enter sends your message. Shift and Enter together start a new line instead, so a long ask does not send itself halfway through.
What to ask first
Ask for one real thing you needed today. Plain sentences work better than keywords, because the copilot is reading a request, not matching a search. Say what you want and what a good result looks like: the length, the language, the format, who it is for.
| A vague ask | The same ask, sharpened | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| Help me with my emails | Draft a reply to the message I have attached. Polite, under 120 words. | One job, one length, one tone. Nothing left to guess. |
| Tell me about the news | What happened with the rail strikes in France this week? Six lines, with dates. | Names the subject and the window, so it can go and read rather than improvise. |
| Make me a chart | Chart the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum over the last 30 days, side by side. | Says what to plot and over what period. The shape of the answer is already decided. |
| Look at this file | Read the attached spreadsheet and tell me the three months with the highest spend. | The file is the input and the question says what to look for in it. |
| Sort out my week | Turn the notes below into a to-do list for this week, grouped by day. | Gives it the raw material and the shape of the result. |
Keep the first ask to one thing. The copilot follows the whole conversation, so your second message can build on the first, and a follow-up that says only “shorter, and in French” works perfectly.
Read the report I have attached and give me ten bullet points for somebody who has not opened it. Plain English, and no numbers I cannot check against the file.
If the answer misses
Say what was missing rather than starting again. Too long, wrong tone, the wrong three months — one sentence is usually enough, and the copilot still has everything from the first attempt.
What happens after you press Enter
A real task is not one answer, it is a short plan carried out. The copilot reads what you asked, decides on a handful of steps, works through them one at a time, and only then writes the reply. Usually you just see the reply arrive at the end. The panels in the next section are how you watch the middle.
Two things follow from that shape. A good ask makes a good plan, which is why the wording in the table above matters more than it looks. And the third stage is where the copilot reaches outside itself, so a task that needs something it cannot reach tends to stumble in the middle rather than refuse at the start.
You are not limited to typing. The paperclip attaches files, and you can drag them into the conversation or paste them in, up to four per message. Speak turns on dictation and writes what you say into the box; Listen reads the copilot's latest reply out loud.
Watching it work, and stopping it
The right-hand side of a conversation holds four panels. They all describe the same run at different depths, and none of them is needed for the task to finish. Open one when you are curious, or when something is taking longer than you expected.
| Panel | What it shows | Open it when |
|---|---|---|
| Tasks | The plan the copilot is working through. Each phase is struck through as it finishes, with a count of how many are done. | You want to know how far along it is. |
| Terminal | Every action as it happens, line by line, with the time of each. | Something looks wrong and you want the detail. |
| Browser | The pages it is reading, while it reads them, with the text it took from each. | The answer depends on the live web. |
| Drive | Your Cyber Drive, grouped by kind: the files you have attached, and anything a task has produced or downloaded. | You are waiting on a document or an image. |
While a reply is being produced, a Stop button appears. It ends the work there and then. Anything already written stays in the conversation, so you can read the half-answer, see where it went sideways, and send a corrected ask instead of waiting the run out.
When the task needs one of your apps
On its own, the copilot can answer from what it knows, read the live web, work with the files you attach, and draw charts and tables. To act inside another service — to post, to add, to send — it needs your own details for that service, and those live in Settings, then Connections.
Eighteen services are there today, in five groups. Spotify and SoundCloud for music. Notion, Trello and Todoist for productivity. Telegram, Discord, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Viber, Zoom, Signal and WeChat Work for messaging. Facebook and LinkedIn for social. eBay, Etsy and Rakuten for shops. Each row asks for your own credentials and links out to the page in that service where you get them.
To check which apps you have connected, open Settings → Connections. The welcome screen does not list your account’s stored connections. For each task, name the app you want to use and check the result before relying on it.
What a task costs you
One message is one operation. Not one per step, per page read or per chart drawn — one per message you send, however long the plan turns out to be.
- Free
- 500 operations a month
- Pro
- 5000 operations a month
- Max
- 25000 operations a month
- Resets
- On the 1st of the month, back to zero
- Daily cap
- None
Because there is no daily cap, you can spend a whole month's allowance in one afternoon if the work calls for it. Your dashboard shows where you stand, on the tile marked Operations / mo.
If you run out, the next task is refused before any work starts rather than left half-done, and the message says so. Nothing else about your account changes: your conversations, your connected apps and your automations all stay exactly where they are. Wait for the 1st, or raise the plan in Settings, then Billing — a higher plan lifts the ceiling immediately, and the Retry button under the refused message is enough to send the task again.
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