Microsoft puts the future of Windows 11 on an AI assistant

Not surprisingly, artificial intelligence was at the center of Microsoft’s annual Build conference, this time the company talked about the future role of technology in the Windows 11 operating system. According to Panos Panay, Microsoft’s executive vice president and chief product officer, AI may be the biggest driver of Windows innovation in the coming years, transforming and simplifying some ways of working and interacting with users.

After the Redmond giant made available the Bing search engine enhanced with a chatbot based on its OpenAI technology at the beginning of the year and significantly improved the capabilities of the coding assistant Copilot available on Github, it goes one step further and makes AI an integral part of the main operating system. Similar to the sidebars you see in Edge, Office apps, and GitHub, Windows Copilot will be built right into Windows 11 and can be opened and used from the taskbar within various programs.

The AI ​​assistant can be asked to perform basic tasks within the system, such as changing the desktop background or turning on night mode, so there is no need to search for the relevant settings within the system menus. Acting as a quasi-virtual assistant, Copilot can even summarize the content of certain documents on request or help you edit images before sending a file, making it more usable than Cortana in terms of productivity.

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The integration of the chatbot based on the generative large language model gave the Bing search engine a significant boost. According to Microsoft, 100 million daily active users were reached after the launch of the function – according to StatCounter, however, the product lost its market share, covering 7.2 percent of the search market in April. after a peak of 9.92 percent seen last October. All this shows that Google’s dominance is still extremely strong.

Microsoft is not fundamentally a company that relies on the search market, and since Windows has a dedicated user base, it can potentially reach more users with the new tool than the “smart” Bing. According to the company’s announcement, more than 1.4 billion active devices run Windows 10 or Windows 11 every month.

Windows Copilot will be available in preview from June, the company will gradually expand its availability after making the necessary changes based on feedback from testers. In its current form, it is a device that relies on text input, which, with the ability to support voice support planned later, will eventually provide more functionality and become a more effective virtual assistant than the voice-based Cortana.

Like Bing Chat, Copilot also supports third-party plugins used by OpenAI ChatGPT, allowing developers to connect their apps with AI, making it even more useful in the future through a growing ecosystem.