Microsoft's Copilot+ AI features feel like early tech demos at best

Microsoft, Qualcomm, and their PC-manufacturing partners are seriously hyping Copilot+ PCs. They’d have you believe that these “next-generation AI laptops” are packed with AI smarts and useful features.

But, while the hardware for AI tasks is ready in these laptops, the actual features built into Windows aren’t making full use of it.

We’re in a weird position. We’re excited about these laptops because they’re the first seriously impressive Windows on Arm laptops. We’re excited about long battery life with snappy performance. And we’re excited that next-generation Intel Lunar Lake hardware is looking like a huge leap for traditional x86 laptops.

But we’re not excited about all these at-launch AI features being pushed by marketing campaigns. Snapdragon X Elite-powered PCs might be intriguing, but if you’re excited about an immediate AI upgrade to your Windows experience, you’re going to be disappointed. Here’s why.

Further reading: Microsoft Surface Pro 7 review: A new long-lasting, Qualcomm-powered era for Windows laptops

Copilot+ PC? More like Copilot- PC

The name “Copilot+ PC” conjures to mind a kind of PC with extra features relating to Microsoft’s Copilot AI chatbot. After all, “Copilot Pro” is a paid subscription that upgrades the Copilot chatbot experience.

That’s not the case at all. A Copilot+ PC offers no extra Copilot upgrades. You get a Copilot key on the keyboard, which first-generation “AI laptops” with Intel Meteor Lake hardware have been offering for many months now. That’s it. Copilot doesn’t run offline or use the new integrated neural processing unit (NPU) hardware to do anything at all.

In fact, the situation is much more dire than that. These machines ship with a new Copilot app experience—it’s no longer a sidebar, but rather a normal floating desktop window. That’s fine. But, as Tom Warren noted for The Verge, the new Copilot app experience is a step back. You can’t tell it to “turn on Dark Mode” or “empty the Recycle Bin” anymore.

Chris Hoffman / IDG

Microsoft may eventually improve the Windows integration in this new Copilot app. And, even if not, this new Copilot experience will eventually come to all Windows 11 PCs. But, at launch, Copilot is surprisingly less powerful on a Copilot+ PC than it is on a standard Windows 11 PC.

It also doesn’t have those fancy GPT-4o features that Microsoft showed off, where it can see your screen and talk you through Minecraft gameplay, for example. Those features will arrive at some point in the future—but when they do, they won’t need Copilot+ PC hardware. That impressive demo will work on all Windows 11 PCs.

AI image generation needs a Microsoft account and internet connection

A Copilot+ PC has some extra AI image generation tools integrated into various apps throughout Windows:

Paint has a Cocreator tool that can generate an image as you draw, modifying it to fit your drawing.
Photos has a Restyle tool that will let you use generative AI as a “filter” for your image. For example, taking a photo and making it look like it was a watercolor painting.
Photos also has an Image Generator feature that generates images to match your text prompts.

Here’s the thing: While these tools all use the NPU inside a Copilot+ PC, none of them work offline. They require a Microsoft account and an active internet connection to work. Why? To check your images for “AI safety” before showing them to you.

Chris Hoffman / IDG

Without getting into whether that’s necessary or not, one thing is clear: There’s no point to running these tools on your computer’s hardware if they also require a cloud service to function. You might as well use a cloud-based AI image generation tool running in a powerful data center somewhere. You’ll get better, more realistic results.

The introduction of these new tools has muddied the AI experience on Windows 11. All of the above tools sit alongside other AI image generation tools that do use Microsoft’s cloud servers. For example, the Image Creator in Microsoft Paint uses the cloud, while the Image Creator in Photos uses your PC’s local hardware.

On a Copilot+ PC, Windows contains a confusing mishmash of AI features that may or may not use the PC’s hardware and may or may not use Microsoft’s cloud services.

Live Captions gains some tricks, but already runs on all Windows 11 PCs

On any Windows 11 PC, you can open the Live Captions app from your Start menu to get AI-powered captions for speech. It uses Microsoft’s cloud servers to generate live captions in real time from any audio—audio in a video file, audio in an online meeting, or even audio being picked up by your PC’s microphone.

On a Copilot+ PC, Live Captions gets a little more powerful: it can now work entirely offline (unlike Microsoft’s AI image generation tools) and it can now translate speech from 44 different languages to English.

Chris Hoffman / IDG

That’s a nice upgrade that some people will find very valuable. But if you don’t already use Live Captions, or if you do and you wish you had real-time translation or offline support, would that be enough reason to warrant buying a new Copilot+ PC? Likely not.

Windows Studio Effects are fine, but not much is new

Microsoft has been talking up Windows Studio Effects as one of the big AI features for Copilot+ PCs. These are real-time webcam effects that use the computer’s NPU to change how your webcam looks in any app.

I like them, really. You can enable fake eye contact or blur your background in any app, for example. And, because it uses the NPU, it’s a power-efficient way to do webcam effects. You won’t be wasting CPU or GPU power in an online meeting.

However, this isn’t exactly new. Windows Studio Effects is the one AI feature that functioned out of the box on first-generation “AI laptops” with Intel Meteor Lake hardware. You don’t need a Copilot+ PC for them.

There are some extra effects: you can use effects like “Animated,” “Illustrated,” and “Watercolor” to change how you look on your webcam in real time. It’s a nice idea, but I find the effects to be very subtle.

Chris Hoffman / IDG

Do I really look “illustrated” in the screenshot above? A little bit! Is that worth buying a Copilot+ PC for? Well, I don’t know about that…

Recall would have been the big feature

Recall will take screenshots of your PC’s display every five seconds, create a big database of your PC activity, and then let you search through it with plain language queries—just like when you talk to an AI chatbot.

Unlike the Copilot AI chatbot or AI image generation features, it will work entirely offline. That’s what Microsoft said when it announced Recall.

Microsoft

It’s clear why Microsoft made such a big deal about Windows Recall when it announced Copilot+ PCs. Without Recall, there’s a distinct lack of a centerpiece AI feature that really sells these PCs. Instead, it’s just a collection of little tech demos that shows off what the NPU can do.

But when Microsoft faced serious blowback regarding privacy and security concerns over Recall, it decided to pull Recall before launch and spend a few more months working on it before release.

Ultimately, this means none of the included “AI” software featured in Copilot+ PCs at launch is particularly exciting.

With Copilot+, you’re buying into a promise

I’m calling these features “tech demos” for a reason. They feel like they exist to demonstrate the power of the neural processing unit and the Windows Copilot Runtime that Microsoft is offering to developers.

The vision of a Copilot+ PC isn’t that Windows will totally transform itself. The vision is that third-party application developers will leverage this hardware to add AI features into their own applications.

It’s early days, for sure. If you’re excited about a Copilot+ PC because of the AI features, I recommend you slow down before buying one because you may be disappointed, especially without Recall.

I always recommend buying hardware for what it can do today, not based on what it might do in the future. (Already this year, buyers of first-generation AI PCs got burned for buying into a vision too early.)

But if you’re mainly excited about the battery life and performance promises of Copilot+ PCs? That may be a good reason to buy one! I’ve been very impressed with the battery life and snappy performance so far. I wish Microsoft and Qualcomm were talking more about that than AI with this debut Snapdragon X Elite laptops.

Let’s stay in touch! Sign up for my free Windows Intelligence newsletter—I’ll send you three things to try every Friday.

Source link