In an odd move, Microsoft opted to highlight all the upcoming artificially intelligent-led changes to Windows a day before its annual developer conference, in an event that wasn’t live streamed but should have been.
Moments ago, Microsoft held a joint Surface hardware and Copilot-infused Windows event where the company jumped with both feet, in on the future of its hardware and operating system indefinitely entangled with AI at their cores.
As part of an hour-long presentation that was given at the company’s Seattle based campus, Microsoft shared with invited guest many of the new features coming to a new Windows 11 experience that’s been tweaked over time with AI and Copilot at its center, as well as new hardware with similar considerations.
Here are some of the key takeaways Windows users can expect to see coming down the pipe both in terms of software experience and hardware specifics.
✅ Revolutionary Performance: Copilot+ PCs boast an astonishing 40+ TOPS (trillion operations per second), enabling unmatched speed and intelligence for any task.
Microsoft spoke at length about how much quicker this upcoming version of Windows 11 will be compared to previous one, noting that thanks to dedicated neural processing units, the operating system could see efficiency boosts as much as 100 times that of older versions of Windows as well as power boosts of up to twenty times.
Microsoft mentioned that because the NPU can take over much of AI processing done in for the new features of Windows, the GPU and CPUs are less taxed, allowing them to perform much more efficiently in sipping battery and rendering effects through the operating system.
✅ All-Day Battery Life: Experience up to 22 hours of video playback or 15 hours of web browsing, redefining efficiency.
Putting an exclamation on their claims of massive speed and power efficiencies, Microsoft made direct comparisons to its leading alternative platform competitor, Apple and its MacBook Air 15 powered by its M3 silicone.
Yusuf Medhi was on stage to state that Windows PCs meeting the new Copilot + PC requirements will “outperform Apple’s MacBook Air 15” by up to 58% in sustained multithreaded performance, all while delivering all-day battery life. With incredible efficiency, Copilot+ PCs can deliver up to 22 hours of local video playback or 15 hours of web browsing on a single charge. That is up to 20% more battery in local video playback than the MacBook Air 15”.
✅ Advanced AI Models: With access to the latest AI models, these PCs offer localized, real-time capabilities for productivity and creativity.
Microsoft executives discussed that there are close to 40 large language models at play in an upcoming version of Windows 11 that range in tasks from multiplatform Live Translations to powering a new on-device historical snapshot experience called Recall.
✅ Recall Feature: A digital photographic memory at your fingertips, making information retrieval intuitive and instantaneous.
The biggest announcement from Microsoft today was its new Recall feature which is set to launch Windows 11 into the future by being able to recall the past. Recall (formerly known as project AI Explorer) is the new Windows Search, but on artificial steroids, where in users can leverage the new required 40-45 trillion operations per second (TPOS) NPU support to “scroll across time to find the content you need in your time across any application, website, document, or more.”
If this sounds like Windows Timeline, then congratulations, you are as old as I am. Microsoft promised a similar experience close to a decade ago with Windows Timeline that was briefly tested in Windows 10 but ultimately abandoned due to low developer support. At the time, developers had to opt-in and leverage the Windows APIs to offer the full envisioned experience MIcrosoft promised.
Now it seems, through AI, Microsoft has figured out a way to circumvent developer buy-in and brute force the experience with even more granularity and specificity.
There is still a level of privacy that Microsoft hasn’t directly addressed with Recall but promises that all interactions are done on device, and that Microsoft doesn’t store any data in the cloud.
Recall leverages your personal semantic index, built and stored entirely on your device. Your snapshots are yours; they stay locally on your PC. You can delete individual snapshots, adjust and delete ranges of time in Settings, or pause at any point right from the icon in the System Tray on your Taskbar. You can also filter apps and websites from ever being saved. You are always in control with privacy you can trust.
Yusuf Mehdi – Executive Vice President, Consumer Chief Marketing Officer
✅ Cocreator: Near real-time AI image generation and editing, integrated into Windows, pushing the boundaries of digital artistry.
Another impressive AI feature displayed during today’s secretive event was Cocreate which is the culmination of features developed to beef up Windows in-box image manipulation app Paint and Photos.
Again, thanks to specific small language model (SLM) processing done in the new NPUs for Windows + Copilot PCs, users can take advantage of first party image creation tool in Paint to use ink strokes as pre-generative prompts versus the more obtrusive text-to-prompt model.
“. Powerful diffusion-based algorithms optimize for the highest quality output over minimum steps to make it feel like you are creating alongside AI.”
The AI is so intuitive that Microsoft was able to build in granular AI adjustments via a new slider experience that dials up or down the level of AI assistance in cocreating images alongside the user.
Windows users will also be able to Restyle images in the beefed-up Photos app using pre-set styles (aka filters) or prompts to touch up or recreate entirely new images.
Microsoft also managed to get a handful of trusted 3rd party creative app developers to buy in on its ARM based future such as Adobe which will be bringing the full breath of its apps suit to Windows on ARM that includes Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Lightroom, Express, and more. Other creative apps such as DaVinci Resolve, CapCut, Cephable, LiquidText, and djay Pro will also be bringing ARM-optimized apps to Windows 11 in the coming months.
✅ Live Captions: Break language barriers with live translations from 40+ languages into English, even offline.
Dedicated NPUs will be hard at work powering Windows 11’s new Live Captioning feature which should function across all first- and third-party apps seamlessly, based on the demos shown during today’s event. Live Captioning works in real-time to crunch forty currently supported languages into English subtitles and should work offline.
✅ Windows Studio Effects: Enhance your online presence with automatic image and sound adjustments for professional virtual interactions.
With Microsoft improving the cameras in the Surface Laptop and Surface Pro powered by AI and Copilot, there was talk of improved Windows Studio Effects coming to these new AI PCs that include improved low-light performance, creative animated filters, eye contact permanence, improved blurring, and portrait focus.
✅ Personal AI Companion: The Copilot key introduces a powerful AI assistant, streamlining complex tasks with a simple tap.
Finally, if the official Copilot experiences coming to Windows that will be simi-powered by a new dedicated Copilot button that replaces the Menu Context key on most keyboards. In the coming weeks, the Copilot experience in Windows will evolve and incorporate Microsoft’s latest partner OpenAI’s GPT-4o into the platform mix.
