AI Essentials Course — Phase 3: Intermediate Techniques
Session 12: Microsoft Copilot — AI in Your Browser
Discover Microsoft Copilot, the AI built directly into your web browser, and learn to use it to summarize, compare, and interact with web content as you browse.
Learning Objectives
What You'll Learn
By the end of this session, you will be able to:
- Access Microsoft Copilot and understand its integration with web browsing
- Use Copilot to summarize and analyze web articles and pages
- Ask Copilot to compare arguments across multiple web sources
- Recognize when Copilot's browser-integrated AI is the most efficient tool to use
Platform Access
Getting Started with Microsoft Copilot
Follow these steps to access Microsoft Copilot and get ready for today's lesson.
- Open your browser and go to https://copilot.microsoft.com.
- You can use Copilot with a free Microsoft account (if you have Outlook, Hotmail, Xbox, or any Microsoft account, you already have one) or sign up for free at Microsoft.com.
- Alternatively, if you use Microsoft Edge as your browser, Copilot is built directly into it — look for the Copilot icon in the upper right corner of the Edge browser.
- Sign in and you'll see Copilot's conversational interface. It works similarly to ChatGPT but is powered by Microsoft's AI technology.
- For today's exercise, you'll also need to have 2–3 web articles open in separate tabs. Choose articles on a topic in your academic field from reputable websites like university press pages, news organizations, or government sites.
- You're ready to begin once you have Copilot open and your articles selected.
Free Account Required
All platforms used in this course offer free accounts with no credit card required. If you already have an account, simply sign in. The free tier gives you everything you need to complete this session.
Core Lesson
Today's Lesson
Read through this lesson carefully before starting the practice exercises below.
You've been learning about AI platforms that live in their own dedicated windows or websites. Today you'll meet an AI that lives where you spend much of your reading time: inside your web browser. Microsoft Copilot is built into the Microsoft Edge browser and is also available as a standalone website. What makes it distinctive is its ability to interact with content you're actively viewing on the web — making it a uniquely powerful tool for anyone who researches, reads, and writes online.
The practical implications are significant. Imagine you're browsing a policy document on a government website, and it's dense with technical language. Rather than copying the text and pasting it into another AI tool, you can simply open Copilot in your browser and ask, 'Summarize this page in plain language' or 'What are the key policy recommendations on this page?' Copilot can see the page you're looking at and respond directly to it. This integrated workflow can save you significant time and friction.
Copilot also excels at comparison tasks across multiple web sources. If you've been reading three different articles on the same topic — perhaps three different perspectives on a policy issue, or three different university descriptions of a graduate program — you can ask Copilot to compare the main arguments across all three. This synthesis task, which might take you an hour to do manually, can be accomplished in minutes with a well-crafted Copilot prompt.
Like all the other AI tools you've learned, Copilot is built on a large language model — in this case, Microsoft's AI infrastructure, which includes technology licensed from OpenAI. You'll notice similarities in how it responds to prompts, and you can use all the techniques you've learned in previous sessions: persona prompts, Context + Task + Format, audience specification, and step-by-step reasoning. The difference is the browser integration and the web-search capability that lets it engage with live web content.
For graduate students who do a lot of research on the web — reading university program descriptions, government databases, think-tank reports, or news analysis — Copilot's browser integration makes it particularly convenient. You don't have to switch between tools; the AI comes to where you already are.
Today's session is designed to show you how Copilot fits into a web-based research workflow. As you practice, think about the specific reading and research scenarios from your own academic life where having an AI inside your browser would save you the most time. That's your signal for when to reach for Copilot.
Hands-On Practice
Practice Exercise
Follow these steps in Microsoft Copilot. Take your time — there's no rush. Learning happens through doing.
- Go to copilot.microsoft.com and sign in. Find a web article on a topic in your field and open it in another browser tab.
- Return to Copilot and paste the article's URL or key passages. Ask: "Please summarize this article in 3 bullet points, focusing on the main argument, evidence, and conclusion."
- Find a second article on a related topic. Paste its URL or key text into Copilot and ask: "How does the main argument in this article compare to the one I showed you earlier?"
- Find a third article. Paste it and ask: "Now that you have three articles on [topic], what are the points of agreement and disagreement across all three?"
- Ask Copilot a follow-up: "Based on these three sources, what question do they all seem to leave unanswered? What would a good follow-up research question be?"
- Reflect: How does using Copilot for web-based research compare to using Perplexity? When would you choose one over the other?
Try These
Example Prompts to Try
Copy any of these prompts directly into Microsoft Copilot and see what happens. Feel free to modify them to match your own academic interests.
Summary
Key Takeaways
- Microsoft Copilot is integrated into web browsing, allowing you to interact with web content — articles, pages, documents — without copy-pasting into a separate tool.
- Copilot is especially efficient for summarizing individual pages and comparing arguments across multiple web sources in a single conversation.
- All the prompt techniques you've learned — persona, Context + Task + Format, audience specification — work with Copilot as well.
- For web-based research, browser-integrated AI tools like Copilot reduce friction and make AI assistance feel like a natural part of how you read online.
Contextual Prompts — Asking AI About Content You're Currently Viewing
You've learned to use browser-integrated AI to engage with live web content — summarizing pages, comparing sources, and generating research insights from the articles you're already reading. This contextual approach keeps AI where your work already is, making research more fluid and efficient.