Microsoft wants to transform every Windows 11 system into an AI PC

Microsoft has officially announced a new set of features and experiences for its Windows 11 operating system, all of which leverage artifical intelligence to work their magic. Notably, these new additions are set to arrive for all Windows 11 users across the board, as opposed to being locked down to PCs with a powerful neural processing unit (NPU) capable of on-device AI processing.

“Today, we’re taking an exciting step forward with a new wave of updates that make every Windows 11 PC an AI PC — with Copilot at the center of it all. We are making the most powerful AI more accessible by integrating it into the Windows experiences people are already using every day,” says Yusuf Mehdi, Executive Vice President, Consumer Chief Marketing Officer at Microsoft, in a blog post.

Among these new AI-powered features is “Hey Copilot,” which is a new voice-based wake and dismissal hot word for triggering hands-free access to Microsoft’s main Copilot AI chatbot. The company is also introducing Manus, a general AI agent for taking actions within File Explorer, a “gaming sidekick” known as Gaming Copilot for the newly-released Asus ROG Xbox Ally series of gaming handhelds, and Copilot Connectors, which allows you to link third-party services to the Copilot app for Windows.

The company has also confirmed the worldwide availability of Copilot Vision, which has until now only been accessible in select regions in beta form. Copilot Vision is an AI tool that, with a users’ consent, can analyze on-screen content and surface suggestions, advice, and other forms of context-aware guidance. Additionally, coming soon to the Copilot Vision experience is the ability to interact with it using your voice, as opposed to being forced to type queries using text.

Lastly, a new Ask Copilot button is being integrated directly into the Windows 11 taskbar, which is designed to provide single-click access to Copilot Vision and Voice, along with offering up a refreshed search experience for looking up apps, documents, and other results using natural language.

In typical Microsoft fashion, there’s no concrete date for when this grab bag of new AI features will hit users’ Windows 11 PCs. In all likelihood, the features will be slowly rolled out over the course of several months, staggered and A/B tested before broader availability. The company has confirmed a new Copilot Labs initiative for The Windows Insider Program, which should accelerate the early testing of future AI features as they arrive.

Microsoft wants to win the AI race

The tech giant is betting big on platform-level artificial intelligence

It’s no secret that Microsoft is all-in on artifical intelligence. With its ChatGPT-powered Bing Chat, which first launched in February 2023, the tech titan caught other industry leaders off guard with its mainstreamification of large language model (LLM) chatbot technology.

Since then, we’ve witnessed the mass consumer adoption of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the accelerated research and development of Google Gemini and Meta AI, as well as the advent of a number of other players, including Anthropic’s Claude, xAI’s Grok, Perplexity, and the China-based DeepSeek.

Microsoft, since rebranding BIng Chat to Copilot in November 2023, has been on a quest to AI-ify every last nook and cranny of its flagship desktop PC operating system. This has assumed the form of a Copilot+ certification program for eligible computers with an NPU capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS).

Now, Microsoft appears to be doubling down on so-called AI PC experiences even on non-Copilot+ PCs — the company is talking openly about its desire to turn every Windows 11 PC into an AI PC, after all.

We’ve been hearing rumors of a potential next-generation Windows 12 release that more deeply weaves AI into the foundations of the Windows platform, but, for the time being, this latest Windows 11 Copilot AI feature drop is an appreciated step in the right direction (that is, assuming you’re into the whole AI thing).