Microsoft Edge on Android and iOS finally supports a full-fledged Copilot experience with nearly all features available on desktop, including plugins, PDF AI and the ability to generate video summaries. On iOS, Microsoft is also testing a full-screen experience for Copilot, tailored for iPad.
Microsoft Edge’s advanced Copilot for Android and iOS is available to everyone in the stable channel. Still, you may need to turn on a couple of experimental flags to try all the new features. Some of you may already have access to Copilot features without turning on flags, as Microsoft appears to be A/B testing AI.
By default, Microsoft Edge’s Copilot on iOS and Android can summarise PDFs, generate text-based answers, and DALL-E 3-powered AI images. When you open a PDF in Edge and click the Copilot icon, AI automatically generates a summary. This works on Android and as well iOS.
As you can see in the above screenshot, Edge Copilot can turn your long PDF documents into short summaries or “key points”. You can also interact with different sections of the PDF, and Microsoft sources tell me the PDF AI integration in Edge will improve contextual queries with GPT-4 Turbo.
PDF AI also works on iOS. However, if you use an iPad and do not see Copilot in the menu, you can head to Edge://flags and enable an experimental flag called “Pad support Copilot” to use the AI on a large screen.
If Copilot still doesn’t support PDF on iOS, you may also need to enable the flags shown in the screenshot below.
Edge Copilot can summarize your videos on iOS or Android
Edge on iOS and Android can summarize YouTube videos, but the feature works only when a transcript is available.
That’s because Edge’s video Copilot summarizes the texts, not the frames of the video.
Edge Copilot’s video summary is limited to pre-processed videos or YouTube content with subtitles. In other words, you won’t be able to summarize all videos, but Microsoft said it should work for most YouTube content.
“In order for it to work, we need to pre-process the video. If the video has subtitles – we can always fallback on that, if it does not and we didn’t preprocess it yet – then it won’t work,” Microsoft stated in response to a user on X.
Copilot plugins now work on iOS and Android
Microsoft is also adding Copilot plugins to Android and iOS. This means you can finally turn off Bing’s search engine capabilities in AI and use it as a standalone chatbot like ChatGPT.
With search turned off, Copilot is just as good as OpenAI’s ChatGPT with faster responses, but it would give you outdated information depending on the query.
Again, this feature won’t be available for everyone, but if you’re lucky enough, you’ll even find third-party plugins in the Edge menu.
As you can see in the above screenshot, a third-party plugin called “Shop” generates the best deals for electronic products. Similarly, another third-party plugin, “Instacart”, is good at finding recipes for your lunch or dinner.
Microsoft is also testing other plugins for Copilot and it has plans to bring ChatGPT’s GPTs to Bing soon.
