OneNote is getting Microsoft’s new AI Copilot to help you write your notes

OneNote is getting Microsoft’s new AI Copilot to help you write your notes

Illustration: The Verge

Microsoft is planning to add its new Microsoft 365 Copilot assistant to OneNote. The software giant originally announced Copilot for apps like Teams, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint last month, and it’s now ready to demo how note taking will be impacted by an AI-powered assistant.

“As your notetaking partner, Copilot uses your prompts to draft plans, generate ideas, create lists, organize information, and more,” explains Greg Mace, a product manager for OneNote.

Image: Microsoft

How the Copilot integration works in OneNote.

Much like Copilot’s integration in Word, the AI assistant can rewrite, format, or summarize existing text in OneNote based on prompts in a sidebar interface. You can also ask the AI assistant to create a plan for an event or generate topics and talking points for meetings.

Microsoft hasn’t shown off Copilot’s inline integration in OneNote yet, though. In the Word version you can highlight paragraphs and the Copilot assistant will appear when you mouse over a section of the paragraph to offer up rewritten text automatically.

currently playing around with Microsoft's AI Copilot for Word, thanks to @XenoPanther. It's only supposed to be available in "private preview" for "select Microsoft 365 enterprise customers," but a few registry keys here and there and you can get the basics working pic.twitter.com/TSO1KgnqwH

— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) March 28, 2023

Microsoft also hasn’t announced exactly when Copilot will be available in OneNote. A small number of Microsoft 365 enterprise customers are currently testing a preview version of Copilot in apps like Word and Outlook, and some of these early versions can be enabled in beta copies of Word right now.

I’ve been playing around with the private preview of Copilot in Word recently, using it to generate text. It’s a very early implementation right now, so there’s lots of missing functionality that needs sorting before it’s ready for public preview. Microsoft is testing this heavily before rolling it more broadly, and the company hasn’t committed to any dates for Copilot just yet.