Microsoft reportedly announces Windows copilot which is an AI personal assistant for Windows 11. With this new announcement, what will then happen to Cortana? Does this mean that the tool will no longer be functional on the platform or it will still exist as a separate entity?
Microsoft Announces Windows Copilot
Microsoft is at the moment adding a Copilot AI assistant to Windows 11. And very much like the Copilot sidebars that we have seen in Edge, Office apps, and even GitHub, Windows Copilot in question will be integrated directly into Windows 11 and it will be available to open and use from the taskbar across all apps and programs on the platform.
“Once open, the Windows Copilot side bar stays consistent across your apps, programs, and windows, always available to act as your personal assistant,” Panos Panay, Microsoft’s head of Windows and devices explains. “It makes every user a power user, helping you take action, customize your settings, and seamlessly connect across your favorite apps.”
What is Windows Copilot
The newly announced Windows copilot can easily summarize content that you are viewing in apps, rewrite it, or even explain it to you. The tool in question looks very similar to the dialog box that is found in Bing chat. With that being said, it means that you can ask it general questions as well as things that you usually might ask a search engine.
It will not replace the search bar on the Windows 11 taskbar directly and it is a separate Copilot button alongside it instead, which is very much like how Cortana had its very own dedicated space on the taskbar in Windows 10. Windows Copilot as you should know is a “personal assistant,” according to Microsoft, which now sounds a lot like just how Microsoft described Cortana as a “personal productivity assistant.”
How Windows Copilot Works
And since Copilot is integrated into Windows, you can as well do things like asking the assistant to “adjust my settings so I can focus” or even take other actions on a PC. The tool is more than the basic Bing Chat link that Microsoft added to the taskbar in the early parts of this year.
As Windows Copilot is built on the very same type of foundations as the Bing Chat, Microsoft is even allowing developers to extend plug-ins that are written for Bing or OpenAI’s ChatGPT to this newly announced AI-powered assistant. That gets to open up Windows Copilot to a whole lot of new functionality that developers are at the moment creating for ChatGPT and Bing as well as for future improvements to be automatically carried forward to Windows Copilot.
Microsoft Hinting About Building AI Features
Microsoft has for some time been hinting about building AI features directly into Windows over the past six months after Panay claimed back in January that “AI is going to reinvent how you do everything on Windows.” Many users had been expecting Microsoft to wait until the next major version of Windows, but the firm on the other hand is clearly pushing ahead with its own Windows AI ambitions instead.
Windows Copilot Availability
Microsoft will now begin testing Windows Copilot publicly in June before it will start rolling it out more broadly to existing Windows 11 users.
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