You don't have to open the chat panel to get Copilot's help. The fastest modes live right where your cursor already is — and they run in the background, so you're never stuck waiting for an answer.
Vibe — AI on a selection
Highlight any text and a Vibe button (a spinning sparkle) appears in the floating toolbar. Click it, type what you want, and press Enter:
"Make this clearer"
"Explain this"
"Turn this into bullet points"
"Translate to Spanish" — or any instruction of your own
Copilot works on it in the background. The chat panel stays closed and you can keep editing while it thinks — nothing blocks you.
When it has a reply, a small bubble appears in the top bar with a preview. Click the bubble to open the full conversation in the sidebar, where you can read the whole answer, keep going, or paste anything you like back into your document.
Ask Vibe again on the same page and it continues the same conversation, so each request builds on the last. Move to a different document and it starts a fresh one.
The inline /ai block
Type /ai in the slash menu to drop an AI block right at your cursor. Write a prompt, press Enter, and Copilot fills it in on the spot — perfect for "write a 3-bullet summary of the section above" without ever leaving the document.
When to reach for the sidebar instead
Vibe is built for quick, in-the-flow edits and questions. For anything that needs a few steps — researching a topic, reasoning across several documents, turning a messy paragraph into a clean table — open the sidebar Copilot. It can call search and web tools and work the problem in stages. And because chats keep running in the background, you can close the panel and let a long answer finish while you carry on writing.