Microsoft announced that it will be implementing an AI ‘personal assistant’ into Windows 11 called Copilot with testing starting in June.
Microsoft announced that it will be implementing an AI ‘personal assistant’ into Windows 11 called Copilot with testing starting in June.
Microsoft is inherently no stranger to AI technology, and the company already has many AI products available.
Starting in June, Microsoft will be testing an implementation of Windows 11’s AI ‘personal assistant’ called Copilot. AI chatbots have seen an increase in popularity over the past months, with ChatGPT, Bing AI, Jasper, YouChat, Google Bard and many others garnering much attention from the public. However, these chatbots mainly only work on browsers or applications. So Microsoft saw an opportunity to bring its AI technology straight to PC users’ operating systems, installing Copilot directly to Windows 11 users’ taskbars.
Microsoft is inherently no stranger to AI technology, and the company already has many AI products available. These include Azure AI, a service designed for developers and data scientists, Copilot for Microsoft 365 including Word, Excel and Powerpoint, Microsoft Security Copilot for data and network security, tools search Bing AI and Microsoft Viva Sales AI. These AI services provide audience-specific catering instructions. And now the company has announced its next ambitious AI service.
The Copilot service already available for Microsoft’s Edge browser and Microsoft’s Office 365 apps are now available directly on Windows 11. Users will be able to access the AI chatbot directly from the taskbar as well as through all All programs run through the operating system. Microsoft’s head of Windows, Panos Panay, said that Copilot’s popularity was in the intention. The team wants Copilot’s sidebar to be “always available” as the personal assistant of Windows 11 users.
Plus a video released by Microsoft provides some examples of how Copilot will be useful to Windows 11 users. Users can ask Copilot “complicated questions” and will receive thorough answers, can adjust settings by asking without having to search through menus and even parse documents and summarize, provide feedback, or even rewrite. Copilot AI will be fully featured and have full access to the user’s PC.
An elaborate example of how Copilot in a user’s PC showed someone designing a logo for their coffee shop. They asked Copilot how to create the logo, and Copilot suggested using the Adobe Express app installed on the PC, along with a summary of how to use it. A link in the Copilot sidebar goes directly to the Adobe Express logo templates. Users will then send the logo they create to other employees through Microsoft Teams via the AI chatbot.
A short clip at the end of the Microsoft Windows 11 Copilot demo video shows other potential uses. These include interactions with Spotify, GitHub, games like Forza Horizon 5, etc. Panay says that “AI will reinvent the way you do things on Windows” and that is Microsoft’s goal. Details on privacy and whether AI shares data with Microsoft were not provided, but Windows users won’t have to wait long for more information as public testing of Windows 11 Copilot will begin. in June.
