is a senior editor and author of Notepad , who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years.
As Microsoft bids farewell to Windows 10 and gets ready to mark the 40-year milestone of its operating system, it’s looking forward to what’s next for Windows. Microsoft might not be ready to announce Windows 12 just yet, but it clearly wants to turn every Windows 11 PC into an AI PC that Copilot controls and users talk to.
“We think we’re on the cusp of the next evolution, where AI happens not just in that chatbot and gets naturally integrated into the hundreds of millions of experiences that people use every day,” says Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, in a briefing with The Verge. “The vision that we have is: let’s rewrite the entire operating system around AI, and build essentially what becomes truly the AI PC.”
Microsoft is launching a set of capabilities in Windows today that will start to weave AI features into regular Windows 11 PCs, instead of consumers having to buy a special Copilot Plus PC. The biggest change is that Microsoft thinks people will want to talk to their computers and have Copilot take actions on their behalf.
“You should be able to talk to your PC, have it understand you, and then be able to have magic happen from that,” says Mehdi. “With your permission, we want people to be able to share with their AI on Windows what they’re doing and what they’re seeing. The PC should be able to act on your behalf.”
Microsoft is leaning on Copilot’s Voice and Vision capabilities to try and make this reality, thanks to a new “Hey, Copilot!” wake word that is now rolling out on Windows 11 PCs. “In our minds, voice will now become the third input mechanism to use with your PC,” says Mehdi. “It doesn’t replace the keyboard and mouse necessarily, but it’s an added thing and it will be pretty profound and a new way to do it.”
We’ve been here many times before. Microsoft tried to convince people to use Cortana on Windows 10 PCs a decade ago, and has added various voice features to Windows for accessibility over the past 40 years. Microsoft is now convinced that AI will somehow spark a change in behavior and convince people that talking to a PC isn’t weird.
“All the data that we see is when people use voice, they love it,” says Mehdi. Some of that data is the billions of minutes that people spend talking in Microsoft Teams meetings. “They’re talking through their computers today, and I think this change to ‘talk with and talk to’ will come to reality and we’ll see this thing really take off,” says Mehdi.
Copilot is coming to the Windows 11 taskbar. Image: Microsoft
I’m not convinced that most people want to talk to their computer, even if it’s great for accessibility and scenarios like getting help with apps. “Doctors are taking transcriptions while they’re performing examinations, people use it for searching, and our work with the accessibility community has taught us a lot about how to make voice access and voice typing really valuable,” says Mehdi.
... continue reading