The future of Windows AI. That’s what we’ve been hearing, and now Microsoft has shown us exactly what that looks like. If the future of Windows is AI, that’s because it’s like any other Microsoft product — the future of every Microsoft product involves AI and a Copilot.
That’s the vision. AI everywhere. But the AI is your copilot, both figuratively and literally. Microsoft’s message is that there is one Copilot, and it will integrate into every Microsoft product — including Windows. But Copilot isn’t where the AI features end.
Here’s what I learned at Microsoft’s big event in New York City yesterday. (For full disclosure: Microsoft provided a Lyft to the event from my hotel, coffee, and a light lunch. The coffee was fine.)
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A Copilot for Windows and Beyond
Microsoft’s Windows Copilot was the big deal in terms of Windows. But it’s not alone. Microsoft’s big announcement was Copilot itself, complete with a friendly and approachable new logo.
“We believe Copilot will fundamentally transform our relationship with personal computing,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
That’s a big rebranding that will extend to Bing Chat, and even that Bing Chat icon in Edge is becoming a Copilot icon, with Bing Chat.
Microsoft says Copilot is one experience that extends everywhere into its various apps, but Copilot will also be its own app. Technically, of course, that isn’t exactly true — Microsoft 365 Copilot, for Office apps, is really a whole different thing and won’t even be available to consumers until next year. But this week, Microsoft shifted from talking about a variety of different Copilots in its apps to talking about one Copilot experience.
Windows Copilot, Coming Soon
Starting September 26, 2023, Microsoft will begin rolling out an update for Windows 11 that puts a Windows Copilot preview icon on your taskbar, to the right of the search box. The Windows+C keyboard keyboard shortcut will launch it. (Funny, that was Cortana’s keyboard shortcut.)
We’ve already seen quite a bit about Windows Copilot, so I knew what to expect.
Windows Copilot is like having a Bing Chat panel that pops up in a sidebar on your PC instead of just in your web browser. But it’s more powerful.
You can ask it anything you can ask Bing Chat, but it can also integrate with your PC. You can ask Copilot to change Windows to dark mode, for example, or to rearrange your windows with Snap.
When you copy some text with the sidebar open, you can choose to send it to Copilot to work with it. You can provide it with images and other files from your PC.
Windows Copilot supports a system of plugins to interact with other apps and services….
2023-09-22 10:00:07
Link from www.computerworld.com rnrn