is a reviewer covering laptops and the occasional gadget. He spent over 15 years in the photography industry before joining The Verge as a deals writer in 2021.
It’s not hard to understand the AI future Microsoft is betting billions on — a world where computers understand what you’re saying and do things for you. It’s right there in the ads for the latest Copilot PCs, where people cheerfully talk to their laptops and they talk back, answering questions in natural language and even doing things for them. The tagline is straightforward: “The computer you can talk to.”
“You should be able to talk to your PC, have it understand you, and then be able to have magic happen from that,” Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi told us in October. “The PC should be able to act on your behalf.”
And that has nothing on Microsoft’s ultimate ambitions for AI, which are to rethink computing entirely. In a recent Dwarkesh Podcast interview, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella agreed when presented with the host’s idea that “these models will be able to use a computer as well as a human,” and went even further, laying out a vision where Microsoft rearchitects all of its software to be infrastructure for AI agents to use in entirely new ways.
This is a bold vision, and an enormous bet. The problem is, right now, talking to Copilot in Windows 11 is an exercise in pure frustration — a stark reminder that the reality of AI is nowhere close to the hype.
I spent a week with Copilot, asking it the same questions Microsoft has in its ads, and tried to get help with tasks I’d find useful. And time after time, Copilot got things wrong, made stuff up, and spoke to me like I was a child.
Copilot Vision scans what’s on your screen and tries to assist you with voice prompts. Invoking Copilot requires you to share your screen like you’re on a Teams call, by hitting okay Every. Single. Time. After it gets your permission, it’s excruciatingly slow to respond, and it addressed me by name every time I asked it anything. Like other AI assistants and LLMs, it’s here to please, even when it’s totally misguided.
Let’s start by testing what Microsoft’s ad shows off. Multiple versions of the ad are posted online, and it even airs on broadcast TV during NFL games. Surely it must be easy to replicate the specific tasks Microsoft wants millions of people to see, especially when this is the groundwork for how Microsoft is reorienting the whole of its business.
In the ad, Copilot Vision scans a YouTube video and correctly identifies a HyperX QuadCast 2S microphone when asked “What mic is she using in this video?” In my tests, the assistant first gave me basics about the benefits of dynamic microphones. Then, unprompted, it started talking to me like I was the person in the video (“I can see your setup right now, and I’m noticing that you have… a big setup there!”), then told me the mic in question was actually the first-gen HyperX QuadCast. To be fair, HyperX makes a lot of similar-looking mics, though at one point it said, “without seeing the exact lighting pattern or any specific features, it’s hard to say definitively which model it is” despite it being bathed in RGB lighting in the image.
On another two occasions, it identified the mic as a Shure SM7b. And when I asked, “Where can I get it nearby?” like in the ad, it once gave me a dead link to Amazon and then a correct link to the wrong mic at Best Buy.
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