“Are you talking to your computer?”
That line from a new Microsoft Windows ad, spoken by a confused bystander, will double as a litmus test for the company’s latest attempt to bring its flagship operating system into the era of artificial intelligence.
Microsoft announced a series of new and updated AI features for Windows 11 on Thursday morning, aiming to move people beyond typing and clicking toward more human-like interactions with computers.
Among the new features:
- “Hey Copilot,” a new wake word that lets users activate Microsoft’s AI assistant by voice and ask it to assist with basic tasks or answer questions using voice commands.
- The expansion of “Copilot Actions” agentic features beyond the browser to the PC, letting the AI carry out actions on its own, such as organizing files or running tasks on the computer, with user approval.
- An updated Windows search feature, designed to return faster and more relevant results across apps, files, and settings.
- A redesigned Windows taskbar, bringing Copilot directly into the main Windows interface for quicker access to voice and vision tools.
- The global rollout of Copilot Vision, which lets the AI see what’s on-screen so it can provide guidance or help inside apps and games.
- New links between Copilot, File Explorer, and cloud services, allowing the assistant to find information in files, emails, and online storage without opening separate apps.
A third input mechanism
It’s part of a larger push by Microsoft to redefine the personal computer around AI. Company executives say the shift to conversational input and autonomous capabilities could prove as significant to personal computing as the arrival of the mouse and keyboard decades ago.
“In our minds, voice now will become the third input mechanism to use in your PC,” said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s consumer chief marketing officer, in a briefing with reporters. “It doesn’t replace the keyboard and mouse, necessarily. It’s an additive thing. But this will be pretty profound.”
More broadly, the company is betting that Windows users will begin treating their PCs less as tools and more as collaborators.
After pushing AI into its Office apps and cloud services, Microsoft is now embedding it directly into the OS. It’s a way of making AI unavoidable on the PC, and testing whether the idea of the “AI computer” will resonate with everyday users rather than just early adopters.
The PC is also the battleground that Microsoft still controls. The company largely missed the smartphone era and has struggled for relevance on mobile devices that run on operating systems from Apple and Google. With AI quickly becoming the next major platform shift, Microsoft wants that transition to start on Windows, not somewhere else.
New capabilities and risks
Apart from the new voice interactions, the biggest update is the expansion of Copilot Actions agentic capabilities across the PC. Microsoft says it will launch as an experimental feature in Copilot Labs for people enrolled in the Windows Insider program, starting with a narrow set of use cases.
This agentic feature also creates new security risks. Microsoft says it has built a new security framework for Copilot Actions, which is disabled by default and runs the AI agent in its own contained workspace and dedicated user account with limited access to user folders.
More broadly, the announcement signals a change in Microsoft’s AI strategy for Windows. The company’s big “AI PC” push began last year with the announcement of Copilot+ PCs, which have a special NPU chip designed for AI tasks. However, the rollout has been rocky, and its flagship “Recall” feature was delayed repeatedly over security and privacy concerns.
With these latest updates, Microsoft is now focusing more on AI features that will work on any Windows 11 PC, not just the models with special hardware.
Microsoft insists it isn’t abandoning the NPU strategy but simply broadening the AI capabilities to reach all Windows 11 users. Copilot+ PCs will get some exclusive features to set them apart, like a new integration for scheduling Zoom meetings using the “Click to Do” feature.
The timing of these announcements is notable, as Microsoft recently ended support for Windows 10, the version of the operating system that debuted in 2015. Part of the goal is to give millions of legacy Windows users a new reason to upgrade to new hardware.
