Microsoft’s Researcher Agent Is Getting Smarter—More Output Control Coming in September
Microsoft's Researcher Agent is getting an upgrade.
From September we'll be getting more control over how it generates outputs and where you can use them.
In terms of output generation, you'll be able to select whether your report is longer or shorter.
And in terms of output locations, you'll be able to take your report directly to Word alongside some other options, one of which looks like it's going to be direct to audio summary from the screenshots (from Microsoft 365 message center) provided.
Researcher is a popular feature, so it's good to see this improving. It will be interesting to see how the Word output is formatted, and whether citations are provided as links that are somewhat unfriendly for some users or properly formatted Word citations. This type of deep integration that demonstrates the different value app selection offers to output choice is something that there are huge opportunities for Microsoft to build into the way Copilot interacts with apps.
However, there is one Researcher (and Analyst) update I think many are waiting for that was not announced here: When are these agents going to get the GPT-5 treatment the main Copilot Chat has?