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Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

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Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#221

Post by jukkan »

heisenzombie wrote: post #79
_fat_santa wrote: post #33

The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use. Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with…

I have Copilot buttons sprinkled everywhere on my work computer, and every time I have tried to use them I get something saying "Oh, I can't do that". It's truly baffling. Copilot button on my email inbox? I try "Find me emails about suchandsuch", and get the response "I don’t have direct access to your email account. If you’re using Outlook (desktop, web, or mobile), here are quick ways to find all emails related to…

Using the paid M365 Copilot ($30/mo) Chat and Researcher agent, I recently discovered an interesting limit: Copilot is technically unable to retrieve more than 24 email messages. Ever.

We can't know if the answers I got from it are reliable but it seems like the Microsoft Graph API calls it makes and the tools Copilot has are missing the option to call the next page. So, a paginated response is missing all data beyond the first page.

I vibe coded this page as "documentation" since obviously no official MS docs exist for anything like this: https://vibes.jukkan.com/copilot-search-gotchas.html

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#222

Post by redbell »

> After leaning on its partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft is playing catch-up in the chatbot race. But data shows that it is losing ground with users.

This explains perfectly the annoying behavior when you search for ChatGPT using Edge. The top thing that appear to you is, well, Copilot and not ChatGPT! Tagged as "Promoted by Microsoft" and labeled as "Your Copilot is here", is clearly a weak move from MS to push Copilot as possible as it can despite its limitations in what it can do compared to its competitors.

At this current time, I think MS situation in the AI arena is not very far from Apple.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#223

Post by PassingClouds »

_fat_santa wrote: post #33

The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use. Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with…

They should be trying to convince people it is something they want rather than forcing it on people. Alas that would mean making a product people want and Im not sure they are there.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#224

Post by mouth »

primax wrote: post #180
mattmaroon wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't know what it does other than respond to emails in Outlook.

It's good for creating meeting notes and action lists in Teams, but that's about it. MS use of AI in apps really feels like their Google+ moment.

I found that the time I spent reviewing and fixing issues/errors/omissions in Copilot’s meeting notes was more than just cleaning up my own notes that I took and sending out.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#225

Post by pjmlp »

codeulike wrote: post #109
pjmlp wrote: post #25

It is remarkable how during the last 25 years (approximately), Microsoft has been improving their ability to deliver first (or be among the first), followed by messing up the whole process so that late comers end up taking the crown jewels. PDAs, mobile phones, tablets, tablets with detachable keyboards, managed OS userspace, HoloLens, the XBox mess, and now AI. There certainly other examples that I failed to address…

But still, Microsoft is the most diversified of the big players - they have Windows, Office, Enterprise, Xbox, Azure, Surface - they can survive a mess like their current copilot mess and still generally thrive

Only because they have enough money in the bank.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#226

Post by [deleted] »

bunderbunder wrote: post #209
shigawire wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is more externally driven as well, a prisoners dilemma. I don't want to keep crapping out questionable features but if competitors keep doing it the customer wants it -- even if infrastructure and bug fixes would actually make their life better.

Last time I saw results of a survey on this, it found that for most consumers AI features are a deciding factor in their purchasing decisions. That is, if they are looking at two options and one sports AI features and the other doesn’t, they will pick the one that doesn’t. It’s possible AI just seems more popular than it is because it’s easy to hear the people who are talking about it but harder to hear the people wh…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#227

Post by [deleted] »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #80
_fat_santa wrote: post #33

The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use. Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with…

I expect this is the crux of the problem. There aren't any "AI" products that have enough value. Compare to their Office suite, which had 100 - 150 engineers working on it, every business paid big $$ for every employee using it, and once they shipped install media their ongoing costs were the employees. With a 1,000,000:1 ratio of users to developers and an operating expense (OpEx) of engineers/offices/management. Th…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#228

Post by pjmlp »

MisterTea wrote: post #81
pjmlp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears the problem is more deep than that. From what I could infer from some community talks, podcasts and so, I would assert that nowadays they have the problem new hires have been educated in UNIX like OSes and Web. Thus Windows team gets lots of folks that never coded anything for Windows, and management instead of having proper trainings in place, just goes with Webview2 and Electron all over the place. I mig…

I would say the web took over as the primary application platform and Unix-likes provided convenient low cost license-free foundations to build them on.

No excuse for not having trainings in place for Windows native development, for those new hires.

You don't see Apple and Google doing the same Webviews all over the place on their OSes, with exception of ChromeOS, which appears to be on the death row to be replaced with Android anyway.

In fact, at WWDC 2025 Apple executives even spoke publicly on the matter against that approach.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#229

Post by Schlagbohrer »

Does anyone know why microsoft thought it would be a good idea to alter the right-click menu in a folder to hide all the important choices behind a second, "Show more options" click? Just making the user click once more where previously they didnt have to?

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#230

Post by pjmlp »

direwolf20 wrote: post #120
askonomm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult to describe just how many people are using Windows not because they choose to, but because they have to. Whether it is because the corporations they work at only give them Windows PC's or because whatever software that they need only runs on Windows. Being able to choose your operating system that you also do work with is largely a luxury of software engineers, I think, but for your average Joe you get…

It's a luxury of market competition as well. Gamers can choose Linux thanks to Valve.

Most gamers rather chose PlayStation, Nintendo and XBox instead of Windows PC.
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