Before ChatGPT’s popularity skyrocketed, I was already testing the chatbot and other models. As a result, in the past two years, I have developed a sense of what makes a model great, including speed, reliability, accessibility, cost, features, and more. Since Copilot launched in February 2023, it has been at the top of my list — until now.
Copilot’s competitive advantage was offering users features that ChatGPT reserved for ChatGPT Plus subscribers for free. These features also solved all of ChatGPT’s most significant pain points, including access to the internet, current event knowledge, and citations. Consequently, Copilot brought the best value to users and earned its spot as the best AI chatbot in my book.
However, in May, OpenAI held its Spring Update event, launching highly anticipated upgrades to ChatGPT, including Copilot’s standout features, such as web browsing, multimodal prompts, image generation, GPT-4 intelligence, document uploads, and more.
So why isn’t it a tie? With the update, ChatGPT also gained features that Copilot doesn’t have, including access to OpenAI’s latest flagship model, GPT-4o, and other cutting-edge upgrades. Below is a round-up of the features that helped ChatGPT reclaim its crown (and how you can use them).
1. GPT-4o
I had to start with the crown jewel of the updates — GPT-4o. The ChatGPT upgrade to GPT-4o from GPT-3.5 granted the chatbot GPT-4 intelligence and a series of bonus features that enable it to perform at a higher level, including higher speeds and improved understanding of vision and audio.
The “o” stands for omni, referring to its ability to understand text, audio, image, and video inputs and output text, audio, and images. This is a significant upgrade from GPT-3.5, which could only understand and output text.
With GPT-4o, free ChatGPT users also got access to the features previously available on Copilot and ChatGPT Plus, including getting responses from the model and the web, chatting about images and documents, using the Memory feature, accessing the GPT Store, and analyzing data.
Copilot still runs on GPT-4 Turbo, which is a very intelligent model despite lacking the many upgrades the new model boasts, as discussed above.
2. Improved understanding of images
Before this update, if you wanted to upload an image, you couldn’t use the free version of ChatGPT but instead had to use Copilot or ChatGPT Plus. Now, users can not only upload images to the free version of ChatGPT but the feature has also been upgraded to offer users better insights.
OpenAI shared an example of how users could leverage the improved vision by uploading a picture of their menu for the chatbot to translate and offer in-depth insights, such as its history, significance, and recommendations. Another example of its advanced capabilities is that users can upload an image and have the chatbot extract the text and turn it into code.
3. GPTs and GPT Store
Perhaps one of the most significant advantages of ChatGPT vs Copilot is that you can create GPTs for free on ChatGPT, while on Copilot, you have to pay for a Copilot Pro subscription of $20 per month. By creating your own GPT, you can customize a chatbot to meet your needs, which saves you lots of time in your workflow because you can skip prompting a chatbot every single time to perform the same function.
Another bonus is the free ChatGPT users can now access the GPT Store, where there are millions of customized chatbots created by other users and developers you can choose from that can help with specific tasks. The store includes GPTs from popular applications and sites, including AllTrails, Khan Academy Code Tutor, Canva, and more.
4. Data analysis
Many people rely on chatbots to assist with tedious data analysis tasks. Luckily, both Copilot and ChatGPT can do that. The major difference is that Copilot’s data assistance is limited to Copilot Pro subscribers and works in Excel to generate formulas and analyze and summarize data.
However, free ChatGPT now offers advanced data analysis tools, including creating interactive charts and tables to visualize your data, interpreting CSV files or spreadsheets, data summarization, and more. Since these operations don’t have to occur in Excel, users can get assistance in whatever data management platform they prefer for free.
5. More languages
As mentioned above, GPT-4o ChatGPT was given some pretty incredible translation capabilities, made possible by its support for more languages. Since the update, ChatGPT has supported more than 50 languages. The chatbot will, by default, detect the browser’s language and update ChatGPT to match, or users can switch it manually in settings.
The increased language support guarantees that people around the globe can access ChatGPT in their language of choice. Copilot does not have such expansive availability with support for only 24 languages.
Bonus: New Voice Mode (coming soon)
If you tuned into the Spring Update event, you likely remember the new Voice Mode demo, which stole the show. Despite Voice Mode previously existing in the chatbot, the new and improved voice mode completely elevates the experience using GPT-4o’s video and audio capabilities.
With the new voice mode, ChatGPT can use the context from your environment to provide voice answers, as seen in the demo below in which the chatbot comments on the user’s emotions just by looking at his face.
Another plus is that the new Voice Mode has been optimized to produce more natural conversation, stopping when interrupted and having different intonation patterns, as seen in the video above. This experience will first roll out to ChatGPT Plus users in alpha but will become more broadly available to free users afterward. On the other hand, Copilot’s voice input acts mostly the same as your standard, unnatural voice assistant.
