Blog

Remember Clippy? The little paperclip that popped up in Microsoft Office with helpful (and sometimes not-so-helpful) suggestions? Well, I’ve built a browser extension that brings him back — sort of. Clippy for Copilot swaps the Microsoft Copilot icon in Office web apps with one of four classic characters, and honestly, it’s the most fun I’ve had building something in a while. Why Clippy? Why Now? Look, I love Copilot. It’s genuinely useful and it’s changing how we work with Office. But there’s something about that little Copilot icon sitting in the toolbar that just felt like it was missing… personality. And then it hit me — what if Clippy was back? Not the annoying assistant that interrupted you every five minutes, but just his face, sitting quietly in the corner where the Copilot button lives. ...

The AI landscape is shifting fast — from tools that just talk to us to agents that actually do work for us. In this post, I’m breaking down three things you need to understand right now: Cowork, Scout, and the new Copilot Studio UI. Whether you’re an end user trying to make sense of all the new terminology or someone looking to automate their working day, this is your starting point. ...

I built a browser extension. Honestly, I never thought I’d say that — but here we are. TabHawk is my first foray into the world of Chrome extensions, and it’s been one of the most rewarding side projects I’ve taken on. If you’ve ever looked at your browser and thought “how did I end up with 47 tabs?” — or if you’re someone whose brain just works a bit differently and keeping focus means keeping things tidy — this one’s for you. ...

With Copilot Chat, Copilot in apps, Cowork, Scout (Frontier), declarative agents and custom agents all vying for your attention, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. I’ve lost count of how many times someone has asked me, “Should I use Cowork for this or just Copilot Chat?” — and the honest answer is, it depends. If you haven’t already, I’d recommend reading my earlier post on Getting Started with Cowork, Scout (Frontier) & the New Copilot Studio UI first — it covers what each of these tools actually does. This post builds on that foundation and gives you a simple framework for choosing the right experience every time, plus two free resources you can use right now to make the decision for you. ...

When you embed a Copilot Studio agent on a webpage using DirectLine and the Bot Framework Web Chat control, it works great — but it’s text only. What if your agent could speak its responses out loud? In this post, I’ll show you how to intercept bot responses from the Web Chat store middleware and pass them to a text-to-speech engine so your agent speaks every reply in the browser. The pattern works with any TTS provider — the browser’s built-in Web Speech API, Azure Speech Services, ElevenLabs, or anything else. ...

Yesterday, Microsoft announced three brand new MAI models — MAI-Voice-1, MAI-Image-2, and MAI-Transcribe-1 — available through Microsoft Foundry and explorable via Copilot Labs. These are Microsoft’s own in-house AI models, purpose-built for voice, image, and transcription tasks, and they’re genuinely impressive. Naturally, I had to build something with them. What is “Once Upon a Prompt”? Once Upon a Prompt is a personalised AI bedtime story generator. You tell it about your kids — their names, ages, and a few fun details — pick a story theme, and it creates a fully narrated, multi-voice story with a custom illustration. All generated in seconds. ...

I recently set out to give one of my Copilot Studio agents its own identity — something I could @mention in Teams and Word, like a proper digital colleague. What I discovered was a brand new preview feature called Entra Agent ID, and it taught me something important about where Microsoft is heading with AI agent identity. Let me walk you through what I found. The Idea: A Personal Productivity Assistant I wanted to build a Copilot Studio agent that could manage my emails, handle my calendar, and pull up Microsoft Learn docs on demand. Simple enough. But I also wanted this agent to have its own identity — something more than just another app registration buried in Azure. ...

I’ve just spent the most productive planning session of my life, and I didn’t write a single line of code. Instead, I had a conversation with GitHub Copilot CLI that took a half-baked idea and turned it into a detailed architecture with 29 todos across 7 implementation phases. This is the story of how AI helped me plan Demo Scribe — a tool to eliminate video editing from my YouTube workflow — and what I learned about planning with AI along the way. ...

If you’ve ever needed to dynamically create an Excel file from data in Power Automate — maybe from a Copilot Studio agent, a SharePoint list, or an API response — you’ve probably realised there’s more than one way to skin this particular cat. In this post, I’m going to walk you through three different approaches to generating and populating an Excel file, each with its own strengths and trade-offs. I’ll be using a sample F1 2026 driver grid as my data, but this could just as easily be data passed from a Copilot Studio Agent, a Dataverse table, or any other source. ...

I’ve been wanting to share this one for a while. If you’ve ever needed to generate professional-looking Word or PDF documents from Power Automate — complete with icons, tables, and styled headers — without reaching for premium connectors or fiddly Word templates, this approach might just change how you think about document generation. The trick? HTML that Word understands. In this post, I’m going to walk through the entire flow step by step, explain the key patterns that make it work, and show you the finished output. Let’s get into it. ...