 "Photo: Windows 11")
Microsoft is introducing a Copilot AI assistant to Windows 11, the company announced. The centralised AI assistance will be integrated directly into Windows 11 and will be available to use from the taskbar across all programs and apps.
The tech giant also announced new features and additions to Microsoft Store, the company’s online store for applications, games and hardware.
In recent months, Microsoft has revamped its search products with artificial intelligence (AI), powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, as the race to harness increasingly competent AI tools hots up. Microsoft has increasingly been investing billions of dollars to capitalize on the excitement surrounding ChatGPT, an AI tool that has massively grown popular in the last few months.
Here’s what new in Windows 11:
Windows Copilot for Windows 11
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The company said that it is the first personal computer platform to allow customers to harness centralized AI assistance for their use. Users can take the assistance of Bing Chat, Windows Copilot, and first- and third-party plugins to quickly get their work done instead of toiling across spending time on repetitive tasks.
Windows Copilot can be launched by pressing the button on the center of the taskbar. The feature will open as a sidebar across apps, programs, and windows, and is designed to function as a personal assistant for the user. Capabilities of features such as copy/paste, snap assist, snipping tool, personalisation will get enhanced with Windows Copilot, Microsoft said. Along with using copy and paste, a user can ask Windows Copilot to rewrite or summarize any piece of content.
Windows Copilot will work similarly to Bing Chat. Users will be able to ask for its response to a wide variety of questions. Tasks like checking the local time of disparate countries and finding flights and hotels can be performed by Copilot, Microsoft said.
The AI feature will be available in the preview for Windows 11 in June.
Microsoft Store on Windows
The tech giant said that changes would also be coming to the Microsoft Store. Features like AI hub, and AI-generated keywords review summary will be the new additions to the Microsoft arsenal.
The AI hub will be an exclusive space on Windows that will sift and sort the best AI tools, features, and customisations built by the developer community. AI-Generated keywords will optimise AI to create and provide search tags for apps. Customers will be able to scan reviews for apps by utilising AI-generated review summaries by collating thousands of reviews into a single summary. Users will have more options to reach customers with spotlight placement in the Store and Bing.com results as Microsoft Ads will broaden its reach beyond the US to more than 150 regions worldwide, starting in June.
Microsoft has been dropping hints about integrating AI features into Windows over the past six months, after Panos Panay, Microsoft’s chief product officer, said that “AI is going to reinvent how you do everything on Windows.”
