Introducing Windows Copilot: Artificial intelligence personal assistant for Windows 11 announced

Anyone remember Cortana? It looks like no one will need to remember because Microsoft is adding a Copilot artificial intelligence assistant to Windows 11. Like Edge, Office apps, and even Copilot sidebars we’ve seen on GitHub, Windows Copilot will be integrated directly into Windows 11 and can be opened and used from the taskbar in any app and program.

“Once opened, the Windows Copilot sidebar stays consistent across your apps, programs and windows and can always be used to act as your personal assistant,” explains Panos Panay, Microsoft’s head of Windows and devices.

AI personal assistant doping into Windows 11

Windows Copilot will be able to summarize, rewrite and even annotate the content you view in applications. It’s very similar to the dialog box found in Bing Chat in general, so it can be asked general questions and things you can usually ask a search engine as well.

It won’t directly replace the search bar on the Windows 11 taskbar, and will instead have a separate Copilot button next to it, just like Cortana has her own private area on the taskbar in Windows 10. According to Microsoft, Windows Copilot will be a “personal assistant”. Therefore, we can say that the time has come for the software giant to remove Cortana to dusty shelves.

Windows Copilot is directly integrated into Windows 11, so it has a wide range of possibilities. For example, there will be prompts like “configure my settings so I can focus.” So this new feature will be much more than the basic Bing Chat link that Microsoft added to the taskbar earlier this year.

Plugins available in Windows Copilot

Because Windows Copilot is built on the same foundations as Bing Chat, Microsoft even allows developers to extend plugins written for Bing or OpenAI’s ChatGPT to this AI-powered assistant. This makes it possible for many new functions and future enhancements that developers have built for ChatGPT and Bing to come automatically to Windows Copilot.

Microsoft has been giving tips on adding AI features to Windows for the past six months, after Panay said in January that “AI will reshape how you do everything on Windows.” Many people expected Microsoft to wait until the next major version of Windows, but instead the company is bringing Windows AI goals to life early on.

Microsoft will begin public testing of Windows Copilot in June before rolling it out more broadly to existing Windows 11 users.