It"s no secret that Microsoft is trying to implement AI features across all of its products, including Outlook. The company has spent the past year turning Copilot into something closer to an autonomous agent that can manage your inbox on its own.
However, just like it"s the case with most AI-powered things, the road isn"t always straight. New features sometimes cause more headaches than they solve, and Copilot"s integration in Outlook has been a good example of that lately.
Reports on Microsoft"s own forums described one particularly annoying bug in detail:
In Outlook Classic running on our Windows Server 2019 RDS environment, Copilot no longer works correctly.
When a user presses Alt + I to Draft with Copilot, or clicks the Copilot pencil icon within the body of an email, and then enters a prompt, Copilot displays "Writing your email" and the blue progress bar starts moving from left to right. At that point it freezes, Outlook crashes, and closes.
In some cases Outlook will automatically reopen after the crash.
The same users noted that Copilot worked fine in Word and Excel, so the problem was isolated to Outlook specifically.
Luckily, Microsoft was relatively quick to tackle this issue and is now fixing it with the latest Microsoft 365 update. The changelog confirms a fix for the exact issue described above, where Outlook closed unexpectedly while using Copilot"s Compose chat feature to draft an email. So, if you’ve recently encountered a similar problem, make sure to update Outlook on your computer, and the issue should be resolved.
The update also includes a smaller fix. The Help me write button wasn"t displaying properly in high contrast mode, which made it harder for some users to even access Copilot"s drafting tools in the first place. That"s now been corrected too.
On the other hand, Microsoft still hasn"t confirmed a fix for a separate bug that made replies stop including the original message, an issue that bothered many users last month.
None of these fixes are groundbreaking, and users are still somewhat reluctant to fully accept Copilot inside Microsoft apps, including Outlook. But if it has to be there, Microsoft seems like it’s at least trying to make it stable.
Source: Microsoft Tech Community| Microsoft 365