Windows 11 has witnessed the arrival of Microsoft’s Copilot in testing, representing the public’s first taste of AI assistants.
Microsoft promised to release Copilot in June when the assistant was announced (in Build) in May, and true to their word, the AI is included in preview build 23493, newly published on the development channel. is included.
However, as you can imagine, there are pitfalls here. First of all, this is a “controlled feature rollout”, meaning only some users will get his Copilot at first, and Microsoft will make it available to more testers over time. We plan to publish it.
In their blog post for Build 23493, Microsoft states: “This first preview focuses on his unified UI experience, and future previews will offer additional features.”
translation? We talk about Copilot here, but mostly how the interface works in the first place rather than the actual functionality or content. Of course, this AI “early research” (as Microsoft calls it) has several capabilities.
You can ask Copilot to perform standard Bing AI tasks (creating photos and writing), summarizing websites (in Edge). AI also has the basic functionality of Windows 11 controls and options.
Examples Microsoft cites include asking to turn on Dark Mode or Silent Mode, or telling Copilot to take a screenshot.
Microsoft states: “Windows Copilot has a base set of Windows Settings plugins, but 3rd party plugins are not yet supported. More features will be added over time as Windows Insiders improve the Windows Copilot experience.” is.”
One final note: To use Copilot with this preview build, you must be running Microsoft Edge version 115.0.1901.150 or higher.
Analysis: Co-pilot landed in time, but landed with unnecessary cargo
The more cynical would have believed that Copilot was pretty barebones because Microsoft wanted to meet its promised June deadline to bring AI to Windows 11, but it finally happened. just did Still, in any case, testers are undoubtedly eager to test AI and want to see what they can do with AI, whose capabilities are likely to expand rapidly.
However, Copilot Ointment has a major problem and that is the following line in the blog post: “You may see inline recommendations through Bing ads that you may find relevant.”
Does that mean ads will pop up in Copilot’s side panel? Apparently yes, but the wording here is that Microsoft will probably test it in small batches and monitor feedback carefully. suggesting. Needless to say, this is something we seriously don’t want, but given Microsoft’s more frequent promotion of veiled recommendations as advertisements in Windows 11 these days, it’s a surprising direction. not.
Most testers haven’t tried Copilot yet, but those in the dev channel who got access seem quietly happy with the AI so far. One Redditor commented: No more digging through settings pages every time you make a small change to your system. Of course, this is only the first stage, so it’s very limited at the moment. But so far I like it. ”
Among Canary channel testers, mind you, developers understand this, even though Canary is the earliest testing channel for Windows 11. I am somewhat dissatisfied that it is not. However, Copilot seems to be coming to Canary soon (although some Canarians have already started saying they plan to return to Dev).
Of course, if you haven’t got Copilot yet and crave Windows 11’s AI assistant, you might be tempted to bring Clippy back (ahem).
