Alongside a few new Floor gadgets, Microsoft has additionally introduced a variety of notable upgrades on the best way for Home windows 11, protecting the Begin menu, Copilot AI, and core Home windows utilities akin to Paint and the Snipping Device.
The Begin menu modifications are important, and I wrote about them final month once they had been first noticed in hidden code. The menu is changing into greater, extra customizable, and extra usable, with the choice to see all apps instantly—and a number of other choices for the way these apps are organized on display.
In case you do not need to see really helpful shortcuts (to latest recordsdata, for instance), these will be hidden. You can even improve the scale of the pinned apps panel. One other change is the addition of a “telephone companion” (basically the Telephone Hyperlink app) on the precise of the Begin menu.
This revamp is coming to the Home windows Insider channel within the subsequent month, Microsoft says, and there are a number of different updates on the identical timetable. One is AI actions in File Explorer, which offers you entry to AI-powered options from the right-click menu: Suppose summarizing paperwork and modifying photographs.
One other characteristic coming quickly to Home windows Insider customers is AI textual content era and summarizing in Notepad, plus light-weight formatting choices. For the primary time you can make textual content daring and italic inside Notepad, and introduce lists and headings. There may even be help for the Markdown formatting language.
Already accessible to Home windows Insiders, and coming quickly to everybody else, now we have Copilot Imaginative and prescient. It means you possibly can chat with the AI about no matter’s on display—whether or not you need buying recommendation or assist with picture modifying— and Microsoft has beforehand given us a good suggestion of the way it works.
Options for Copilot+ PCs
A number of the newly introduced options are arriving first on Copilot+ PCs (those who meet a sure efficiency standards) with Snapdragon chipsets. Once more, these updates are showing within the Home windows Insider channel first, earlier than making their method to everybody else with a Copilot+ PC. Microsoft has intimated that they’re going to roll out ultimately to PCs powered by AMD or Intel.
First, Microsoft is placing an AI agent inside Settings, so you will get assist discovering the toggle swap you want or determining how one can do one thing. One instance proven within the Microsoft demo is typing “my textual content is simply too small” to search out the choice for font measurement. The AI agent may even change settings for you, when you give it permission.
What do you suppose to this point?
We’re additionally getting extra actions for the Click on to Do characteristic (basically an AI-powered, context-sensitive right-click menu), together with choices to schedule conferences in Groups or launch the Immersive Reader mode for textual content. Home windows search is getting a lift too, with better protection for pictures, settings, and the Microsoft Retailer.
The Pictures app constructed into Home windows has slowly been getting higher and higher, and it will quickly choose up a relight characteristic for dynamic lighting management. You can set as much as three lighting sources, and regulate the brightness and depth, whereas seeing the modifications on the picture in actual time.
As for Paint, it is gaining the power to create customized stickers from textual content prompts, and a brand new object choose software that can use AI to pick out objects with a single click on. If you’ll want to transfer or take away one thing in a picture, this could make the method of choosing it quicker and extra simple.
The Home windows Snipping Device is getting extra options as properly: clever screenshot cropping, the power to extract textual content from screenshots, and a shade picker. Lastly, the Narrator on Copilot+ PCs is being upgraded to supply wealthy picture descriptions, so it’s going to have the ability to describe charts, pictures, and different visible components which can be on display.
