Microsoft has been promising to build an AI assistant into Windows for months — and now it’s here. Sort of. Windows Copilot AI has arrived in a pre-release form for Windows 11, but it’s a long way short of what Microsoft originally promised.
When Microsoft first teased Windows Copilot, it was portrayed as a hugely powerful AI assistant that would seamlessly adjust settings, interact with installed apps such as Spotify, and let the AI examine the contents of documents. This first release is much more limited.
Find out how you can start using the Windows AI assistant today and what it’s like here.
When will Windows Copilot AI be released in UK?
The Windows Copliot is available now to Windows 11 users via Windows Update, but you might need to tick a special option before you’re given the AI assistant.
To ensure you get Windows Copilot:
1. In Windows 11, open Settings and then Windows Update from the menu on the left.
2. In the box that says “Get the latest updates as soon as they’re available”, move the slider to On.
3. Now press the Check for Updates button at the top of the screen. If you have outstanding updates, you may need to install those first.
Once all of your updates have installed and the system has restarted, you should see the Copilot icon installed on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen.
Microsoft has been in something of a hurry to get this AI assistant into Windows, so it’s actually been released as a minor update to the 2022 version of Windows, instead of the 2023 update that’s due later this year. That partly explains why it still has a little ‘pre’ label on the AI assistant icon.
How good is Windows Copilot AI?
If you’ve used the Bing Chat AI facility that Microsoft has been offering for the past few months, then you’ll be very familiar with Windows Copilot. It’s little more than the Bing offering built directly into the Windows 11 desktop, rather than having to visit Bing in the Edge browser.
That’s not to say the Bing AI isn’t very impressive in its own right. Based on the hugely popular AI technology behind ChatGPT, the Windows Copilot can do anything from summarising long emails, to writing computer code, to composing poems in the style of John Betjeman. It’s a fantastically powerful tool and it’s completely free to use.
Still, it doesn’t yet live up to the promise of Microsoft’s early promotional videos for Windows Copilot. For example, Microsoft suggested the AI would be completely embedded in the operating system, able to adjust system settings with plain English commands such as as “turn my screen brightness down”.
However, this early version can only access a very limited selection of about half-a-dozen, very basic settings, such as turning on dark mode or muting volume. When I asked it to do something a little more complex, such as helping me to add a Bluetooth mouse, it gave me a completely incorrect set of instructions for Windows 10 instead of Windows 11.
Likewise, Microsoft’s promo video suggested the AI assistant would readily interact with installed third-party apps. Ask the AI assistant for a chillout playlist, for example, and it would open Spotify and fill you with audio bliss. Instead, all it does is suggest links to playlists on YouTube.
Nor is there an option for the AI assistant to interact with your documents, as Microsoft originally promised. You can’t drag Word documents or PDFs into the AI assistant and ask questions about them, as the early promo video showed. Nor can it read your email or even write a new email for you, without you having to cut and paste the suggested text into the email yourself. Microsoft is seemingly saving those features for paying customers (see next section).
There are a couple of nice features that hint at how powerful Windows Copilot could become. Take a screenshot with the Snipping Tool, for example, and the AI assistant asks if you want it to examine the image. When I took a screenshot of a Mazda MX5 car and asked the AI assistant to identify the car model, it got it spot on and then offered to suggest dealerships where I could buy one. Shame its first suggestion was a Porsche dealership down the road…
How does Windows Copilot differ from Microsoft 365 Copilot?
Microsoft 365 Copilot will be an AI assistant built into familiar Microsoft Office apps such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
If you need an AI assistant to provide a one-page summary of your company’s annual report, to write an automatic reply to a customer’s email, or to suggest ways you could add zinging graphics to your presentations, Microsoft 365 Copilot promises to do just that.
There’s a catch, however. Initially it will only be available to customers on Business and Enterprise versions of Microsoft 365, not for home users. And it will cost a stonking £30 per month on top of what you’re already paying for each of your Microsoft 365 licences.
