Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is the consumer-facing chat assistant that absorbed the old Bing Chat brand in late 2023. The bing.com/chat URL now redirects to copilot.microsoft.com, where users get a conversational interface backed by OpenAI's frontier models, real-time Bing web search grounding, citations, and built-in image generation via DALL-E. It handles long-form writing, research with sources, code help, and multimodal inputs (text, voice, image upload).

The pitch is that it's free, search-grounded, and tightly integrated with Microsoft's ecosystem: Edge sidebar, Windows taskbar, Office documents (via the paid Copilot Pro and Microsoft 365 Copilot tiers), and Skype. Compared to a raw ChatGPT session, Copilot leans harder on live web retrieval and citation, which makes it more useful for current-events research but sometimes more cautious and slower to answer. Copilot Pro at $20/month unlocks priority access to the newest models, faster image generation, and Copilot inside the Microsoft 365 desktop apps for personal subscribers.

For developers, the same underlying capability is available via Azure OpenAI and the Copilot Studio low-code builder, but the bing.com/chat product itself is the consumer chat surface, not a developer API. It's a credible free alternative to ChatGPT for general-purpose Q&A, particularly when web freshness and source links matter.