Microsoft offers Dragon Copilot, an AI assistant

REDMOND, Wash. – Microsoft Corp. has unveiled Microsoft Dragon Copilot, calling it the first AI assistant for clinical workflow that brings together the trusted natural language voice dictation capabilities of Dragon Medical One (DMO) with the ambient listening capabilities of DAX, fine-tuned generative AI and healthcare-adapted safeguards.

Part of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Dragon Copilot is built on a secure modern architecture that enables organizations to deliver enhanced experiences and outcomes across care settings for providers and patients alike.

Microsoft said that clinician burnout in the U.S. dropped from 53% in 2023 to 48% in 2024, in part due to technology advancements. However, with an aging population, and persistent burnout felt across the profession, a significant U.S. workforce shortage is projected.

In response, health systems are adopting AI to streamline administrative tasks, enhance care access, and enable faster clinical insights to improve healthcare globally.

“We are aware of the administrative burnout affecting our clinicians, and the need for improved care access for our patients, and the newest evolution of Dragon represents a significant step forward in alleviating this strain,” said Glen Kearns (pictured), EVP and CIO, The Ottawa Hospital. “We are thrilled to be one of the first customers in Canada to use Microsoft’s ambient and generative AI technology. The newest evolution of Dragon Copilot could help alleviate documentation burden for our clinical teams.”

Joe Petro, corporate vice president of Microsoft Health and Life Sciences Solutions and Platforms, said: “At Microsoft, we have long believed that AI has the incredible potential to free clinicians from much of the administrative burden in healthcare and enable them to refocus on taking care of patients,” said

“With the launch of our new Dragon Copilot, we are introducing the first unified voice AI experience to the market, drawing on our trusted, decades-long expertise that has consistently enhanced provider wellness and improved clinical and financial outcomes for provider organizations and the patients they serve.”

Dragon Copilot combines DMO’s speech capabilities, which has helped clinicians document billions of patient records, and DAX’s ambient AI technology, which has assisted over 3 million ambient patient conversations across 600 healthcare organizations in the past month alone.

With these ambient AI capabilities, organizations have already realized significant outcomes, with clinicians reporting five minutes saved per encounter, 70% of clinicians reporting reduced feelings of burnout and fatigue, 62% of clinicians stating they are less likely to leave their organization, while 93% of patients report a better overall experience.

“With Dragon Copilot, we’re not just enhancing how we work in the EHR — we’re tapping into a Microsoft-powered ecosystem where AI assistance extends across our organization, delivering a consistent and intelligent experience everywhere we work,” said Dr. R. Hal Baker, senior vice president and chief digital and chief information officer, WellSpan Health. “It’s this ability to enhance the patient experience while streamlining clinician workflows that makes Dragon Copilot such a game-changer.”

Key features of Dragon Copilot allow clinicians and other care providers across specialties to:

• Streamline documentation: Clinicians can take advantage of multi-language ambient note creation, automated tasks and multi-language support, personalized style and formatting, natural language dictation capabilities, speech memos, editing, customized texts, templates, AI prompts, and more in one singular user interface.
• Surface information: The embedded AI assistant functionality allows clinicians to conduct general-purpose medical information searches from trusted content sources.
• Automate tasks: New capabilities allow clinicians to automate key tasks, such as conversational orders, note and clinical evidence summaries, referral letters, and after-visit summaries, in one centralized workspace.

Clinicians working across ambulatory, inpatient, emergency departments and other care settings will benefit from Dragon Copilot’s fast, accurate, secure and intuitive speech and ambient capabilities to document care, navigate electronic health record (EHR) workflows, and perform other administrative tasks.

Dragon Copilot will be generally available in the U.S. and Canada in May, followed by the U.K., Germany, France and the Netherlands. Microsoft is also committed to bringing a new Dragon experience to other key markets using Dragon Medical today.

With Microsoft’s extensive healthcare industry partner ecosystem, healthcare organizations can unlock more value from Dragon Copilot by accessing new solutions and integrated offerings. These partners include leading EHR providers, independent software vendors, system integrators and cloud service providers that each play a unique role in enabling organizations to deliver meaningful outcomes using the Dragon Copilot solution.

Dragon’s new capabilities are built on a secure data estate and incorporate healthcare-specific clinical, chat and compliance safeguards for accurate and safe AI outputs.

They also align to Microsoft’s responsible AI principles to help guide AI development and use — transparency, reliability and safety, fairness, inclusiveness, accountability, privacy, and security. We remain committed to developing responsible AI by design and ensuring that these technologies positively impact both the healthcare ecosystem and broader society and will share our learnings on this journey with our customers.