In the past I’ve highlighted both features as among the best in Word in Computerworld’s “Word for Microsoft 365 cheat sheet.” But as I was updating the article recently, I couldn’t find either feature. So I did a little digging and found out that Microsoft killed them, because the company claims Copilot duplicates those capabilities and they’re no longer needed.
That’s not true. First off, if you’re a business or educational customer, you have to pay $30 per user per month for Copilot for researching capabilities that used to be baked into Microsoft 365. Beyond that, Copilot is inferior to both Smart Lookup and Researcher. Copilot doesn’t confine itself to using the vetted, high-quality journals Researcher uses; instead, it does a garden-variety web search. It also won’t embed properly formatted citations into Word. As for Smart Lookup, it’s more difficult to perform a search with Copilot than with the original tool. With Copilot you can’t highlight words or phrases in a document and have a web search automatically done.
There’s also a much bigger problem: Copilot still has a tendency to “hallucinate,” which is a fancy way of saying it makes things up that simply aren’t true. Researcher and Smart Lookup use vetted, reliable sources — and don’t hallucinate. Since you can’t trust Copilot not to hallucinate, you’ve got to do extra work checking its facts — and even then you might not be able to spot its hallucinations.
Source: Computer World
