Hands On With Microsoft Copilot in Windows 11, Your Latest AI Assistant

pcmag.com:

A colorful new icon will soon appear on your Windows 11 taskbar, and it leads to a new era in desktop computing in the form of Microsoft Copilot. This AI chat sidebar powered by OpenAI, Bing, and Microsoft technologies can change computer settings or open apps. It can not only generate text and images, but also create either based on the other. In just two days of using Copilot on my Windows 11 PC, I’ve already started to rely on it as a research tool.

The feature is clearly marked as a preview, and it still has a way to go in some areas, as you’ll see below. In particular, its abilities to open apps and websites and to control Windows itself are limited in this early release, and voice input, though excellent in some ways, can benefit from wake-word functionality. Sure, there are better generative AI tools if you pay for them, but as a free companion to Windows 11 users, Copilot brings powerful new capabilities to a massive number of people.

After updating your PC to version 23H2 of Windows 11, you should see a colorful new icon with the letters PRE next to the search box:

Tapping this, or pressing Windows Key-C, opens the new Copilot panel on the right side of the screen:

This sidebar shrinks any program window that might overlap it, but you can still open the Notification or Quick Settings panel over it, so it’s not always on top in the strict sense. But it persists even if you switch among multiple Desktops. The sidebar is not resizable, which can be a problem for some types of results, as we’ll see later. You can scroll back up in the sidebar to refer to any previous conversation entries, as long as you haven’t clicked the blue New Chat button next to the text entry box or Refresh from the three-dot menu at the