Get # Microsoft's New Dawn: Embracing AI with Copilot in Windows

As the speed at which tech evolves is no longer a slow yet continuous process – it’s a sprint. With Windows opening its door to AI and embracing the capabilities of artificial intelligence – what was once the stuff of sci-fi movies becomes part of the daily Windows computing experience today! Say hello to Copilot, an innovative new assistant from Microsoft Windows that complements your productivity by automating tasks that are so easy to perform, your mind can’t even fathom the idea. But how will Copilot change the Windows experience and why might you already be benefiting from some of its features without lifting a finger? Let’s take a look.

Introducing Copilot: Your AI Companion in Windows

Copilot, AIs embedded under many layers of metal and plastic in Microsoft’s Windows 11 operating system, is perhaps the most ambitious of these new products. Copilot can be summoned by clicking a button scattered throughout the Windows 11 system, which asks input, questions, and identifies things (including images) for contextual information. From one click, a user is met with something close to conversation, sharing and feeding information from humans to AIs and back.

MICROSOFT OFFICE: Where Copilot Shines

Outside of one-off searches and basic tasks, Copilot is also trained to be a productivity companion, helping in Microsoft Office – the software suite that has powered the desks of more workers than any other. It assists in Microsoft Word with research, grammar and content structure, all without leaving the app. In Excel, it can navigate intricate formulas and graphs, while for PowerPoint, the creation of presentations is made step by step, prompt by prompt.

Copilot and Microsoft Excel: A Match Made in Data Heaven

Drilling down slightly, now Copilot was used with Microsoft’s Excel app. See for yourself: Create a sophisticated graph with virtually no input. Invoke the ‘calculate your commute’ feature, which – shockingly – has none. Pull in data, pick colours, specify design without any prior Excel knowledge Here’s how Microsoft’s blog described this: Not only has Copilot drastically reduced the time to investigate insights, it’s also demystified data analysis and visualisation for all. Generating sophisticated graphs and obtaining formulas from minimal input will now be accessible to anyone using an advanced Excel feature that previously might have appeared far too complex, if available at all.There’s more: while Copilot increases external output speed, it also expands your creative, thinking and doing space. For example, it does so when used with Bing Images. Although generally impressively good at image search, Bing is prone to lead with very weak, often irrelevant results. So I often put ‘image’ into Bing, followed by a very good search term and find something far better than the initial top 10 images. That’s another model to train AI, but for now I better stop it. I also used Bing to summon a new version of an old font, the Californian-iconic Coop Black (invented by the Sony designer Mieke Meijer).

MICROSOFT EDGE: Browsing with an AI Edge

Copilot arrives in Microsoft Edge too, to help you read and browse more thoroughly and quickly: summarise pages, compare products, you name it. Your digital assistant in Edge will do it. Your conversations with the web will never be the same.

The Future is Now: CoCreator and Recall

Meanwhile, Microsoft says that the AI future is getting even brighter: it will soon offer services such as CoCreator and Recall. CoCreator (which will eventually be built into apps such as Microsoft Paint and Photos) is meant to turn crude sketches into detailed images, inspired ‘by the way people’s minds can wander and trigger their creative spark’. Recall, Microsoft says, ‘is an AI-powered system that intends to redefine memory’. Where memory is now a sequential mental journey, Recall would instead store snapshots of a user’s activity, making it possible ‘to retrieve information on demand’. Of course, despite the promises of giving people power over their own lives, there are increasingly louder cries for privacy that might undermine Microsoft’s reassurances that these are built on bedrock notions of consent and clarity.

Copilot: A New Era of Privacy Considerations

Great power brings great responsibility, and Microsoft pays attention to striking the right balance between innovation and the privacy of its users. Even Copilot’s features are revolutionary but they all come with a strong commitment to user privacy. In setting the path for AI in our digital lives, Microsoft is exploring not only ways to enable new levels of capability, but also of how to do it while keeping security and trust paramount.

Embracing the Future with MICROSOFT's AI Innovations

Microsoft’s evolvement in bringing AI to Windows through Copilot is an example of its vision of a future where technology makes our everyday tasks simple, better and more delightful as these features are increasingly built into our use of computing technology. Microsoft is committed to this mission of creating new capabilities while humanizing computing in a way that it is ethically grounded, respecting privacy and maintaining trust.

What This Means for Microsoft

When AI becomes intelligently baked into Windows and other Microsoft products, the user experience Microsoft is trying to create is not a new user experience: it’s a new culture of computing intelligence. As Copilot and other AI features become more deeply ingrained, Microsoft appears to be preparing the ground for a world in which technology is easier to use, more natural, and more closely attuned to what the user is thinking and cares about.

To round this off: Microsoft’s imperious declaration of what AI can do, with Copilot and beyond, is a turning point in computing. Making this kind of technology easy to use and available to everyone is fundamentally changing the way we interface with our computers. That way of interacting with our machines is changing in turn. Microsoft’s promise to innovate, to protect privacy, and to empower people should mean that its AI journey is only just beginning. We haven’t yet even seen what it might feel like to be human in the future, post-Microsoft-AI.