With Microsoft's AI chatbot Copilot now on mobile systems, the company is aiming to help it become your new favorite go-to assistant. Recently, the company published an update to the beta build that lets you swap your default phone's assistant with Copilot. I was curious as to how Microsoft's AI assistant would do as a replacement for the default Google one, so I swapped in Copilot on my phone for a week and gave it a roll. Here's what I discovered.

You end up missing the default assistant features

Controlling your assistant with your voice is just too convenient

The first thing I wanted to do when I set Copilot as my assistant was activate it using a wake word. Much like how I can say "Okay Google" to my Android phone to activate its default assistant, I wanted to know what I had to say to activate Copilot. Turns out, you can't.

It seems that third-party assistants can't be activated with a wake word, even if you set them as your default. And while it doesn't sound like a big deal on paper, I did like being able to summon my assistant with a voice command while I was busy with other things. While it's not a fault of Copilot itself, it did make me want to use it less than the stock assistants on my phone.

The other thing I noticed is that Copilot doesn't appear over your other apps, much like the default assistant. Instead, if you invoke it through your phone's designated assistant button, it boots up the app itself. Again, this is likely something that Microsoft has no control over, but I did like how using the default assistant didn't take you away from the app you were in.

Copilot doesn't do typical assistant tasks

It's not a perfect replacement for a mobile assistant

When you use Copilot as your mobile's assistant, you'll have to be prepared to sacrifice a few features. Because Copilot is designed the way it is, it means that it cannot handle some features that you can expect from your current mobile assistant. This can make Copilot on your phone a dealbreaker if it can't handle your favorite commands.

For one, without a wake word, you have to activate the assistant manually and then press the microphone button to begin talking, which isn't as convenient as Google's default option. I then gave Copilot some example commands I would give my Google assistant. Turns out, Copilot can't really do timers; it's not built for it. Likewise, if you ask it for directions somewhere, to open an app on your phone, or to perform a system-based task, it can't do that. And when I asked it to play pop music, it gave me a Python script that presumably plays Shape of You by Ed Sheeran.

These are all commands that require the app to have some sort of control of the operating system it resides in. As such, if you replace your assistant with Copilot, you'll have to treat it as if it's in a vacuum, without any phone outside of it.

...but Copilot can still do a lot of things right

For the right people, Copilot is a hit

Despite Copilot lacking some features, there are some that remain. For example, you can ask Copilot about the weather, and it will give you the most recent report and cite what website it got it from. And, of course, if you approach Copilot as an AI-powered chatbot instead of a typical assistant, you can get some good results. For example, asking Copilot what an NPU is gave me a more in-depth and succinct answer than if I asked Google Assistant. And translation requests went into far more detail than Google's offering.

Perhaps my favorite part of Copilot as my assistant was having a GPT chatbot at my fingertips. Sure, it couldn't disable my Wi-Fi or set a reminder, but I could still feed it photographs and ask about them from the comfort of my phone. And because Copilot comes with GPT-4, you have a powerful chatbot you can summon in a moment's notice.

Microsoft Copilot as an assistant: not better, not worse, just different

When I first set out to use Copilot as my assistant, I was keen to see how it would fare vs. the default Google app. However, after using it, I came to the realization that I was trying to compare apples and pears. Google Assistant has access to the operating system, while Microsoft Copilot draws on the power of the latest in GPT technology.

As such, I can't say that Microsoft Copilot is strictly better or worse than Google Assistant. If you use your phone's assistant to set timers, create reminders, and tweak your phone, you'll find Copilot a chore to use. But if you're always asking your phone's assistant for facts, translation, and image deconstruction, Copilot does the job far better.