Off to a rather disappointing start Copilot Pro

A few days ago, I took the plunge and signed up for a one-month trial of Copilot Pro. I’ve dabbled with it over the past few months, and I’ve really become fond of its conversational interface and integration with Microsoft tools and services. I was really looking forward to increasing my usage and trying some more sophisticated scenarios.

This morning, I fired up Copilot on my Pixel phone and asked it to start a list of home repairs, which it did cheerfully. I stated that my goal was to build a list of potential projects to share with my wife, and that I’d want help organizing and prioritizing the list. I started adding a few items conversationally, and almost immediately, Copilot started glitching.

The first thing I noticed was its tendency to interrupt me after every short pause, often before I’d finished my statement. It seemed very eager to parrot back what I had just said, instead of waiting for me to finish my thought or prompting me to continue. At one point, I told it to please stop interrupting until I was finished, which it did. I’d say about a dozen items into the list, I asked it how I could synthesize an organized document with all these items I’d added, to which Copilot responded that it was unable to generate files but rest assured it would be able to summarize our conversation and fully recount the items I’d added at any point. Ok, I responded and kept adding items.

After about 20 items total, I asked Copilot to give me the full list we’d discussed, to which it replied with maybe the six or eight most recent items. I complained that that wasn’t the full list, and Copilot Pro apologetically responded that it would take a few moments to dig through our conversation and make sure everything was there. It came back with the same list with maybe one more item. Again, I complained that it wasn’t everything and asked about a specific missing item. It apologized again and responded that if I would just tell it which items were missing, then it would be glad to add them. Which, I’m sorry, is complete nonsense. If I have to remind it which items it forgot, then what’s the point? I asked it to dig a little deeper and try to figure it out, and instead it started pulling in unrelated conversations I’d been having with it days earlier about organizing my OneDrive. Lame.

Perhaps shame on me for investing too much time in an initial foray without first testing the waters, but I have to say I’m disappointed. I feel like Cortana could’ve done a better job at least adding these items to a notebook 10 years ago.

So, I turned to ChatGPT. Not only did it not have any trouble recounting the full list of items, but it helpfully offered to organize them by interior versus exterior, which tasks were likely to be DIY versus requiring a professional, and priority. I ran into my conversation limit, but I will absolutely visit it again this evening to see what else I can get it to do.

Am I just going about this all wrong, or is Copilot just that bad?