Industry

Microsoft just deleted five Copilot features. What to use instead

Copilot lost Group Chats, AI podcasts, Labs, Deep Research and Mico by 18 August 2026. Here is what to use instead, feature by feature.

Multi Chats Team
September 13, 2026 · 5 min read

Open your Copilot app and something is missing. Probably several somethings.

TechCrunch reported the cuts on 13 August 2026. Five consumer features were going by 18 August. The standalone consumer Copilot app is being folded into the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. The reporting frames the whole exercise as streamlining Copilot to compete with ChatGPT and Claude.

Microsoft's own pages block automated checks, so everything below is attributed to that reporting.

Here is what disappeared, and what works as a replacement for each one.

The five that are gone

  • Group Chats

  • AI-generated podcasts

  • Copilot Labs

  • Deep Research

  • Mico, the animated character

Only one of the five got a named successor.

The framing came from Microsoft EVP Jacob Andreou. An internal memo, reported in July by The Information, said the app had to earn "the right to exist" in customers' lives. That is the language of a product cull.

First, find your files

Files created in the standalone Copilot app migrate to OneDrive, per the same report. Look there before you assume anything is lost.

Do that first. The rest of this article is useless if your work is sitting in a folder you have not checked.

Deep Research: the only one with an official successor

Microsoft points Deep Research users to a feature called Researcher. The catch is who gets it. Researcher goes to paying professional users. If you were on the free consumer app, the replacement is not aimed at you.

Every other big assistant ships a long-form research mode. Gemini has one. So do ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Vibe (formerly Le Chat) from Mistral.

Access depends on your plan, and tiers move around. We could not confirm current pricing for any of them today. Check the vendor's own plan page before you pay.

MultiChats has no feature called Deep Research. What we have is web search with citations, across four search backends: OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Perplexity Sonar. That covers finding current sources and citing them. It will not produce the long agentic report Deep Research users were running.

For Group Chats, two real options

This one is straightforward, because two products already do it.

ChatGPT launched group chats globally on 20 November 2025, across its Free, Go, Plus and Pro plans. Up to 20 people per chat, invited directly or by link. It decides when to chime in, and you can tag it by name to pull it in. It reacts with emojis and picks up on profile photos. Each person keeps their own settings and memory inside the shared space.

Poe added group chats across multiple AI models on 18 November 2025, so several models can sit in one thread.

MultiChats has no group chat. If that was your main use for Copilot, one of those two is your move.

Google still makes AI podcasts

Copilot's podcast feature generated audio shows from your material. Google has shipped the same idea for longer, as Audio Overviews in NotebookLM, now branded Gemini Notebook. Tone controls arrived in September 2025.

One caveat before you migrate. Gemini Notebook moved to compute-based usage limits on 2 September 2026, with a five-hour reset window in place of a daily one. What counts against you now is prompt complexity, chat length, how many sources you loaded, and which features you used. Heavy jobs can be queued with a "Generate later" option. Budget your sessions accordingly.

MultiChats reads answers aloud and has a voice mode. Neither one turns your documents into a podcast.

So what replaces Copilot Labs?

Nothing does, directly. Labs was the experimental shelf: unfinished things, early. The whole appeal was access to what had not shipped yet.

The practical substitute is an app that adds new models quickly, so new capability reaches you as it lands. MultiChats runs 60 models from 18 providers on one account, 21 of them on the free tier.

Nobody is replacing Mico

Mico was the animated face. People got attached to it. There is no like-for-like replacement in a mainstream assistant, and we are not going to invent one for you.

If you liked the voice more than the face, every major assistant has a voice mode now. Ours is live on free accounts with a monthly allowance, and Pro raises the cap.

What this actually teaches

One plain point, then the checklist.

All five features lived inside one vendor's app. When that vendor reprioritised, all five went in a single week, and users had no say in it.

Removals still happen when you run several models under one account. The difference is what a single cull costs you. One option out of many, rather than your whole setup. That is the argument for a multi-model app, and it is the only pitch in this article.

If you want the detail, we keep a MultiChats vs Copilot comparison and a Copilot alternative page. Plans are listed on the pricing section of the homepage.

Your five-minute checklist

  • Check OneDrive for files from the old standalone app.

  • Used Deep Research? Pick one of the research modes above, then confirm which plan includes it.

  • Used Group Chats? ChatGPT or Poe.

  • Used podcasts? Gemini Notebook, and expect the new usage limits.

  • Used Copilot Labs? Follow model releases somewhere that adds them fast.

  • Used Mico? That one is a real loss. Nothing on the market fills the seat.

Sources: TechCrunch on the Copilot removals, 13 August 2026, TechCrunch on ChatGPT group chats, 20 November 2025, TechCrunch on Poe group chats, 18 November 2025, TechCrunch on NotebookLM podcast tone controls, 3 September 2025, 9to5Google on Gemini Notebook usage limits, 28 August 2026.