Microsoft has recently unveiled its latest innovation, the Windows Copilot, an AI-Powered Personal Assistant that promises to transform the user experience on Windows 11​¹​.

What is Windows Copilot?

Windows Copilot is an AI assistant that will be integrated directly into Windows 11, available to open and use from the taskbar across all apps and programs. Once open, the Copilot sidebar stays consistent across your apps, programs, and windows, acting as your personal assistant to help you take action, customize your settings, and connect seamlessly across your favorite apps​¹​.

What Can Windows Copilot Do?

Windows Copilot has a broad range of features. It can summarize content you’re viewing in apps, rewrite it, or even explain it. Similar to Bing Chat, you can ask it general questions and things you might usually ask a search engine. It won’t directly replace the search bar on the Windows 11 taskbar but will exist as a separate Copilot button alongside it. It’s also integrated into Windows, so you can do things like ask this assistant to “adjust my settings so I can focus” or take other actions on your PC​¹​.

Here are some other tasks that the Copilot is capable of, as presented at the Microsoft Build conference:

• Rewriting, summarizing, or explaining your content
• Proposing an appropriate Snap Layout to clean up your cluttered desktop
• Playing mood-appropriate music on Spotify
• Switching your PC to dark or light mode
• Summarizing or explaining any selected text on your PC’s screen
• Transcribing spoken audio
• Using third-party apps to do tasks and facilitating communication between them​²​.

How is Windows Copilot Related to Bing and ChatGPT?

Windows Copilot is built on the same foundations as Bing Chat. Microsoft is even allowing developers to extend plugins written for Bing or OpenAI’s ChatGPT to this AI-powered assistant. This allows Windows Copilot to benefit from new functionality that developers create for ChatGPT and Bing, as well as future improvements to be automatically carried forward to Windows Copilot​¹​.

What Are Some Potential Concerns?

While the capabilities of Windows Copilot are certainly exciting, they also raise a host of questions. For instance, can you disable it? Will it have access to everything on your PC such as text, images, websites, and financial data? How hard is it to get apps to use it? Will it work with Phone Link? 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? These are some of the queries that users might have regarding this new feature​²​.

When is Windows Copilot Available?

Microsoft will begin testing Windows Copilot publicly in June before rolling it out more broadly to existing Windows 11 users​¹​.

In conclusion, Windows Copilot represents a significant advancement in the integration of AI into our daily computing tasks. However, as with any new technology, there are questions about privacy, data usage, and accessibility that will need to be addressed as it becomes more widely available.