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Getting cited: using Microsoft Copilot for divergent color scheme suggestion
Copilot is Microsoft’s Generative AI chatbot that natively understands various kinds of information and generates text responses. In this writing, I share my experiences using Copilot as a color suggestion system for diverging data color schemes. During the process, I was cited.
In an earlier writing, I showed how to use the chatbot for recommending sequential color schemes that are designed for ordering numeric information where colors progress from low to high (or vice versa).
A diverging color scheme fuses two sequential color schemes, each with different hues, together with a shared neutral midpoint color. Colors increase in darkness to represent differences in both directions from the meaningful mid-range data point. The data color scheme is often used for data that include a critical midpoint value (the mean, median or zero value) and a data distribution with two ends of importance. Let’s get started by examining some details about Microsoft Copilot.
What is Microsoft Copilot:
On February 7, 2023, Microsoft launched a Generative AI system called Bing Chat that has evolved into Copilot. Copilotis intended to be integrated into Microsoft’s next update to Windows. Using text-based commands, users can ask the chatbot for assistance in tasks such as creating emails, essays, and code. There are several reviews that describe the capabilities and projected roadmap of Copilot. The basic version of the Copilot web site is free to use. In January 2024, a premium subscription service to Copilot became available for $20 a month that is analogous to the paid versions of ChatGPT and Google Gemini. For this writing, I am using the “free” version of Copilot available at https://copilot.microsoft.com..
Asking Microsoft Copilot for Diverging Data Color Scheme Recommendations:
As the first step in my explorations, I asked Copilot to “specify by color hex codes a five step diverging color scheme”. Copilot responded with:
