It’s been a few short years since Microsoft banished Cortana, its ill-fated voice assistant, from Windows 11 computers. This has been in preparation for Copilot to step in and take its place, it seems, as Windows 11 users are getting a new voice assistant. One that responds to ‘Hey, Copilot’.
Why? Microsoft’s consumer chief marketing officer, Yusuf Mehdi, reckons that “voice will now become the third input mechanism to use with your PC”, though he doesn’t explain how that’s supposed to be a good thing. He does explain that Windows users “should be able to talk to your PC, have it understand you, and then be able to have magic happen from that.”
When your AI product messaging references ‘magic’ (which, by definition, is mysterious, hard to attain, and doesn’t actually exist), it might be time to get someone else to write your talking points.
Microsoft Copiloting Windows
As for how ‘Hey Copilot’ actually works, in its current form, the wake-word will open a prompt that will permit users to ask a question about whatever’s onscreen at the time. How useful that will be is up to you, but the company demoed folks changing Spotify audio quality settings, asking Copilot to write a snippet based on a photograph portfolio, and other basic tasks that really didn’t need to be automated.
Copilot Vision, an opt-in feature that lets Microsoft’s AI see what’s on your screen, will be a requirement for most tasks, while the company is working on Copilot Actions, which will… let the AI take action on your behalf. Most concepts are mundane, so far, like organising folders and icons, but since Actions doesn’t exist yet, we can ignore it for now.
That might be worth doing with Microsoft’s AI ambitions in general, since they sound horrifying. Mehdi says the company plans to “rewrite the entire operating system around AI, and build essentially what becomes truly the AI PC”, something that will end with AI “naturally integrated into the hundreds of millions of experiences that people use every day.” That sounds pretty dystopian for anyone who isn’t banking on AI making them a ton of money at some indeterminate point in the future.
In other words, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, and others are desperate for this future outcome, and are willing to ramrod AI into anything that stands still long enough to bring that future about.
But hey, you’ll be able to talk to your Windows computer, and it’ll be totally different from the last time you were able to do that. Honestly. “I think this change to ‘talk with and talk to’ will come to reality and we’ll see this thing really take off,” said Mehdi. It all sounds a bit wishful on Microsoft’s part, but it also sounds like it’ll keep going whether anyone uses the feature or not.
