Tell an AI assistant to play some music, open an app, or change screen brightness on your PC? Does that sound familiar? Cortana used to do all that before Microsoft kneecapped it and relegated it to the OS’s seldom-visited app store. Apple’s Siri can sort-of do this stuff on Macs, and Google Assistant on ChromeOS. Now, Microsoft’s blog post announcing Windows Copilot uses a suspiciously familiar phrase: “Always available to act as your personal assistant.”
Many watching the presentation about the AI-powered Windows Copilot at this year’s Microsoft Build conference may have thought, “Ooh, you can do generative AI natively in Windows!” More may have been thinking, “Microsoft is putting AI on my Windows PC. Scary!” I was more excited about the new tool’s ability to change the screen brightness on my PC.
The main problem is that Copilot seems to only accept typed text. You could of course just hit Windows Key-H to make the computer type what it hears in any text field. But the big piece missing is voice wake, which you still get on ChromeOS and macOS.
Cortana even one-upped those services: It could let you turn off the PC with your voice. You’re done with your work, you’re across the room, and you just want to tell the PC to shut itself down, like you can turn your TV off with a smart speaker. I can only imagine how depressed Cortana is seeing another blue icon take up residence next to the Windows search bar where she used to reside.
Windows Copilot Prompts Many Questions
Other questions I have about this bleeding-edge new technology coming to Windows:
- Can you disable it?
- Will it have access to everything on my PC? Text, images, websites, financial data?
- How hard is it to get apps to use it?
- Will I have to set permissions in Windows Settings on a per-app basis?
- Will I have to enable it in each app?
- What granularity of permissions will there be for apps? For example, will an app have access to my system settings?
- Will Windows Copilot work with Phone Link?
- In which case, will it be a chat box for everything you do on your PC?
- Where will the data from my prompt text and results be stored, used, or shared?
- How proactive will it be? Will it pop up like Clippy every time you start doing something on your PC?
The list goes on.
I expect that Microsoft will take its time before unleashing Windows Copilot on the entire Windows 11 population, as it has with most major new features, like Bing AI chat. The latter was shown to behave in scary ways when pressed during its limited preview, after which Microsoft quickly limited the number and type of questions it accepted to tamp down that issue.
And what about those users who are scared of AI? The ability or inability to disable Windows Copilot will be one of the first topics for tech journo screeds. Judging from recent Windows features with any whiff of privacy issues, Microsoft will let users disable it.
What's Appealing About Windows Copilot?
Barring those questions for the moment, there are some very appealing capabilities of Windows Copilot shown at Build. Here are just a few examples:
- It can “rewrite, summarize or explain your content.”
- It will offer to clean up your cluttered desktop by proposing an appropriate Snap Layout.
- You can ask it to play mood-appropriate music on Spotify
- It can switch your PC to dark or light mode
- It can summarize or explain any selected text on your PC’s screen
- It can transcribe spoken audio, and I expect...
- ...it can use third-party apps to do stuff and lets them communicate with each other.
In short, it combines the functions of Cortana, Alexa, ChatGPT, and Google, but in a more understanding way. Ask it for the weather. Ask it who won the last World Cup. Ask it the square root of 389. Ask it to find flights. Ask it what Word documents you were working on yesterday. Or ask it to change your desktop wallpaper or create a logo you describe using Adobe Express.
Windows Copilot starts previews this June, though Microsoft hasn’t indicated how limited the preview will be. I assume it will appear on Windows Insider preview builds for a long time before it’s an option in released Windows, and it may not even appear until Windows 12.
One of the most encouraging things about Windows Copilot, though, is that it’s designed to help you do your job or run your life, not to replace you. Now if it can only shut down my PC across the room at the end of the day.