To get its AI tools into more hands, Microsoft has announced a deal for US-based students, and in part for non-US students. From this week, the Redmond giant is offering a three month free trial of its Microsoft 365 Personal subscription to US students. Included in this is Copilot, more generous storage, and more.
Once you have finished the trial period, students can also get a recurring 50% discount on the Microsoft 365 Personal plan, bringing the price down to $4.99 per month from $9.99. Students outside of the United States are not eligible for the free trial, but they can avail of the 50% recurring discount.
Unlike the Copilot which everybody has access to, this plan allows you to use Copilot inside Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote. College students use these tools for a lot of their work, so having access to AI could help boost their productivity, though, you have to wonder what impact it could have on cheating.
Discussing the privacy issues around the usage of Copilot, Microsoft said:
“To protect your privacy, we do not use your prompts, responses, or file content (such as Word documents or Excel spreadsheets) when you use Copilot in the Microsoft 365 apps to train our foundation models. Importantly, this subscription is a personal license, and not associated with your college or university, so your data stays with you after you graduate.”
In addition to access to Copilot without Microsoft 365 apps, this subscription also gives students one terabyte of cloud storage. No longer will those who take advantage of this deal need to sift through files to delete to make room for their new files.
The final perk of this subscription, which applies only to the United States, is privacy and identity protection with Microsoft Detection. Defender allows you to browse the net more safely with always-on threat monitoring for your identity (US only), phones, and computers.
Anyone that’s eligible and interested in taking Microsoft up on its offer can learn more here. If you do decide to take advantage of it, know that the three month free trial portion of the deal is only available for a limited time.
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