Microsoft Just Released Some New Co-Pilot Features
After a disappointing launch in June, Microsoft is retooling Copilot and Copilot+ to better match the competition. It’s a controversial update, however: It loses some of its original unique promises—the new version doesn’t seem to include any tools for tweaking Windows settings—even though it gains multimodal features (like ChatGPT) and Generative AI Filling ( for example, Photoshop) .
Copilot chatbot gets a vote
In a series of videos and a blog post , Microsoft said that Copilot now has a new, more neutral look, as well as the ability to communicate via voice, and will soon also accept data from video. This is similar to what companies like Google are doing with Gemini Live , with some tweaks from Microsoft.
The most obvious are the cards that appear when you open a new Copilot app or website , which resemble Microsoft’s Live Tiles user interface from older versions of Windows and give you suggestions for what to do with Copilot based on your past chat conversations. bot.
More interesting is the Copilot Daily feature, which presents an AI-generated summary of the latest news headlines. They are taken from approved partners such as Reuters or the Financial Times to avoid copyright issues, and are presented in a sort of TV news anchor voice. A quick distraction upon waking would be useful, although I would caution against using a newly developed robot as your sole source of news.
The new look and voice support are available for iOS, Android and the web today, and Vision, which will let you point the camera at your surroundings to use them by asking the AI questions (say, “What breed of dog?” is it?”) is currently part of the Copilot Labs experimental program.
Copilot Labs also has a “Think Deeper” feature that will allow you to give the AI more time to answer your questions, possibly improving your results. Copilot Labs features will be available to a limited number of Copilot Pro subscribers at first—it’s not something you can just sign up for like a Windows Insider account .
At this point in the AI lifecycle, none of these discoveries are particularly revolutionary, and even Copilot Daily has similar competition in apps like Perplexity . The unique but controversial Recall feature , which will take continuous screenshots of your Copilot+ PC, is still in testing, although Microsoft says it will soon be available to testers with Qualcomm Copilot+ chips.
Meanwhile, Copilot+ laptops are getting some additions to Paint and Search to hold them over.
Copilot+ laptops may finally pay off soon
Building on Paint’s existing Cocreator feature, which uses generative AI to create images based on your sketches, Generative Fill and Generative Erase let Copilot+ laptop owners adjust their images without having to draw anything first. Fill will simply let you create and place AI images from text, while Erase works a bit like Google’s Magic Eraser, letting you paint over the elements you want to remove from a photo using a brush, then watch them erase and be replaced with images. The AI considers this appropriate.
The Copilot+ version of the Photos app also features AI upscaling, which uses on-device AI to fill in the gaps in low-resolution photos, increasing their resolution by up to eight times. Microsoft says you can get 4K results “within seconds,” although I need to see more sample results before I can really recommend the tool.
Meanwhile, Windows Search on PC Copilot+ will soon use artificial intelligence to recognize the contents of your files, not just their names. This means you can search for the word “cat” and get photos of cats even if the word “cat” is not in the file name. While Microsoft hasn’t said the feature is in testing, the company seems to think it’s not ready yet, saying it will arrive first in File Explorer next month and in Windows Search and Settings “in the coming months.”
Perhaps this extra time is intended to address any privacy concerns that may arise from Microsoft tracking your files, as happened with Recall , although Microsoft says the feature will work offline.
One of the features that Microsoft says is in testing is Tap to Do. Click to Do feels like right-clicking with the help of artificial intelligence: Copilot analyzes what you’re currently doing on your computer and suggests appropriate actions in the context menu. It’s a little more complicated, as you’ll need access to Scissors or Print Screen to do it, but it’s the only new feature that takes us back to Copilot’s original promise of helping you pilot through Windows. Click to Do will be available to Windows Insiders on Copilot+ laptops next month.
Overall, today’s changes and announcements are significant in the sense that there’s a lot to dig into, but it may be a while before they really impact your workflows as some of them are in testing and you’ll need a Copilot+ laptop to access to most of them. Whether this will be worth the investment in Copilot+ remains to be seen, but at best, features like Generative Fill could potentially save you the cost of a Photoshop subscription.