2.5: Interlude on personalisation

Customise your personal assistant

When you are signed in to a chatbot such as Copilot, it remembers your interactions. It not only saves your chat history – it also stores certain ”memories” about your collaboration and your preferences. This means that, over time, it gets to know you better and better.

If you go to Copilot’s settings, you will find a tab called ”Customisation”. Here you have several options for customising how Copilot should interact with you – and, not least, what it knows about you.

Under ”Custom instructions”, you can give Copilot general instructions on how it should address you, how it should usually respond, and similar preferences. For example, if you are tired of its answers always being very long, you can ask it to reply concisely unless you explicitly ask for a long answer.

Under ”Saved memories”, you can see what Copilot remembers about you. Spoiler alert: it may well be a mixed bag – and there may be parts of its memory that muddy your collaboration. If so, you can delete those memories.

When you chat with Copilot, you can continually ask it to update its memory (“Remember that...”). This can, for example, be useful if you are particularly pleased with an answer or discover a general preference for how it should act.

1:1 with your artificial PA

To get the best possible collaboration with Copilot, we recommend that you regularly set aside time for a ”1:1” in which you can discuss your preferences for working together.

By having a conversation specifically about your collaboration, you get a better sense of what Copilot assumes and knows about you, and how you actually want the collaboration to work.

Through the conversation, you therefore have the opportunity to shape your relationship so that it matches your professional wishes and needs. Simply ask Copilot to update its memory when you arrive at something you would like it to remember from the conversation.

Below you will find a description of how you can approach your 1:1 with Copilot.

EXERCISE: 1:1 with your artificial PA

1. Start a chat with Copilot using a prompt along these lines: ”I would like to have a conversation about how you can help me in my work and how we can work together most effectively. Ask me questions (one at a time) about how you can best assist me and what my preferences for our collaboration are.”
2. Continue the conversation: answer Copilot’s questions, but also feel free to ask questions in return.
3. Ask Copilot to update its memory if, along the way, you formulate preferences or points that you would like it to remember for next time.