Hands-On Windows 212 transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take another look at Copilot in Windows 11 because it just keeps changing.

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Paul Thurrott [00:00:15]:
Hello everybody, and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurrott, and man, it's been, I want to say, 3 months-ish Since we last talked about Copilot, Microsoft has consolidated what were previously 2 separate Copilot apps, Copilot for Windows 11, which is for consumers, and Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is for business users, into a single app for both audiences, right? This is something they did previously for Teams. One wonders why they didn't just do this from the get-go, but we're not going to question that because we don't have that much time. There are some new kind of free/paid tier wrinkles, meaning anyone who has Windows 11 and can bring up Copilot and use it to some degree, but you get more usage if you have a Microsoft 365 subscription if you're a consumer. If you're a business user, you get more still if you have a Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription, which is extra. We're not going to look at that part of this too, too much, but basically there's, there's different terms to this. Microsoft has a free tier and then what I'll call usage-based billing, because that's what they call it, UBB, for the rest of it. So I do have a Microsoft 365 subscription, it's possible some of the things I'm showing you here might rely on that.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:37]:
I apologize if that's the case, but you know, that's what we're getting. That's what we're doing. And then there's a new user experience, which is you can see right here. So I brought this app up already. I actually really liked the previous Copilot user experience. You can still see it in Microsoft Edge if you use like the Microsoft Edge Copilot new tab page, or if you just access Copilot in Microsoft Edge, you'll see that interface. It's just kind of graphical and pretty and, and nice. This new UI is much more minimal, minimalistic, I guess.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:09]:
And actually, I like it too. I mean, honestly, it's one of those kind of get out of the way type things. It's not, you know, taking over the screen. So you could have this next to something else, and it's not going to dominate your screen visually. And I assume that's part of the point, frankly. But But we're also only partway to where Microsoft wants to go with this app. And so if you're familiar with Copilot, if you used it at all or use it a lot, you might be looking at this and you could probably pick out a couple of things that are different. But there's something that internally Microsoft calls a super app that is coming where they will have kind of 3 top-level focuses.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:47]:
So there's like this, the home view, which is essentially what we're looking at here. Standard chat and all the things you might do with an AI assistant. Code, which is for creating custom apps, which seems like kind of an esoteric feature, but is something that's going to become more and more mainstream and something we'll talk about actually on this podcast a little bit in the future. And then Autopilot, which is the new name for Microsoft's personal AI assistant. So this is an AI assistant that works for you, knows a lot about you if you allow it to, and you would if you wanted to do anything. It used to be called Scout, but then it was never really out anyway, so it's still coming down the pike. So as I record this episode, this new Copilot app with the 3 tabs, the 3 main views, is rolling out to Microsoft's business customers who have enrolled in the Frontier program, meaning they want early access to this technology. But this version of the app is basically the new shell of this coming new app with some UI changes we'll get to in a moment, minus some of the more— I'm going to call them advanced features related to things like AI agents, which will be coming soon.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:54]:
So we've looked at this, you know, at least whatever, wherever it was 3, 4 months ago. I assume we will look at it again sometime before 3 or 4 months goes by. So it's just evolving so quickly. If you were familiar with Copilot, or are familiar with Copilot, you might know that there were no tabs here before. You just had this sidebar with whatever tabs and views that were available. But in this version, there are now 2 tabs. The second tab does not apply to me. So I'll give this a second.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:25]:
Cowork right now is an AI service for mostly for business users. I could up, you know, upgrade to unlock this thing, which meaning I'd have to pay a lot more money. But, um, We can effectively ignore that for now. Plus, this will be updated soon when they change the whole UI for that new, the kind of agentic version of this app that's coming down the pike. So beyond this, though, you've got a very similar sidebar. You've got some choices up here. You've got your chat history down here. If you were familiar with this app before, there are some differences here.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:59]:
Search is new. That was not in the previous version of the app. Library was. Uh, Notebooks is new. Um, and we'll get to that in a moment, but that used to be Projects essentially. Um, and then there's some new, there's some options off here. Discover was available in the previous version. That's basically a feed of sorts, although that's changed a lot too.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:17]:
And then Shopping, uh, Shopping is a new view. Learn is a new view, but it, sorry. Uh, but it has the functionality that's in it was available elsewhere in the app before. So, you know, some kind of a goofy. Changes there or whatever, but, um, not a big deal. The, the one big thing, maybe if you ever use this, is that unless I'm missing it, um, that quick view is no longer available. So there used to be a 4th button up here and you could run this in kind of a smaller window, which I thought was kind of nice for running the app next to other things, but, um, that's gone. So now you just have to manually resize the window.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:52]:
I guess there's nothing really else to do there. All right, so let's get to the changes. I'm not going to do a lot with AI directly. We did that before in the previous episode. We could reference some of the stuff we did, I guess. But primarily here, what I want to look at is just the things that are different, right, in this version of the app. And you can see that first here in Settings. So this General tab here is new, but a lot of the options here are things that were in— I think it was called Preferences before in the previous version of the app.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:21]:
But These are all the, you know, the shortcuts for things like ways you can launch this app, you know, either using your voice or whatever keyboard combination, et cetera, et cetera. So this is a much bigger change. So here in personalization, you can go in here and customize this thing, right? So if you've used any AI assistant, you probably know these things can be a little sycophantic. You know, you'll ask it something, it'll be like, oh, it's a great idea. You're so smart. You're the best. And so I like to just kind of customize this thing to not be like that, right? And there's different ways you can do that because they're creating what is essentially a prompt, which it will then keep in its memory. And you can hand edit this if you'd like.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:03]:
So I think that's actually really cool. That's really good. Memories were something that was available previously in Copilot. And this is the type of thing you need where The AI assistant otherwise would just run as a new thing every time you used it, but this will keep the context of your previous conversation. So it gets to know you over time, which I know is freaky for some people, but honestly is super useful. And then the other big one that's new is sources. And this is something like a lot of the things you're seeing here are very common in other AI assistants. So Um, you can ground the conversations you have with this AI in other data sources, including now data sources that aren't from Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:49]:
So it's not OneDrive and Word and whatever you might have up in documents, uh, there and so forth. Um, you know, Notion, Google Calendar, um, Gmail, Google Drive, et cetera. So, um, interesting stuff there if you want to do that kind of work, but I won't, I won't do that now. So, and then as far as the major views and what has changed, like search, like I said, is new. This is very useful, especially the more you use Copilot, the more you're going to need, you get into it, you're like, well, okay, I did this thing one time, where the heck is it? This is just a way to see everything, but you can also just filter it by like chats, Word documents, notebooks, which we'll get to, and then other data sources, right? So kind of an interesting list. I know I was working on an image, but I don't, you know, I can't find it, that kind of thing. I can't, I don't see it in this list. Kind of, you know, search is obvious.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:35]:
I don't have to explain that too much. The library view. This works exactly like it did before. So this is basically a combination of the images and then the pages you've created, right? I've created a lot of silly images using Copilot over time. So you can kind of see some of those here. Notebooks is new, but it isn't, right? So if you're familiar with what used to be called Notebook LM, which is now called Gemini Notebook, Google created this thing. Which turns out is a really good idea. It's basically a project space where you pull in the documents or websites or whatever it is that you want to ground the AI in, and then you make a project, whatever it might be, based on just that data without it, you know, hallucinating with, you know, all the data on the internet, that kind of thing before.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:25]:
So there are these projects in here related to dinosaurs, one of which I would have used in the previous show about Copilot, right? And so at that time, what these things were, were projects, but now they've become notebooks, right? So it's just, it's a different name, but it's kind of the same thing. And if you were familiar with Copilot before, you may recall the ability to create things like flashcards and quizzes and so forth. So this stuff is all still in there. Nothing's been lost. It's not just a name change, but it's, it's really just the new projects. And then if I go off this more menu here, so Discover, like I said, is a feed, although this has changed. So this one's kind of curious. This is a little bit like, I don't know, Google Dream Beans, if you're familiar with that.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:09]:
Not as fanciful perhaps, but based on the conversations you've had with it and or the data that you might have in sources it can see, it will give you some suggestions. So in other words, this isn't a to-do list based on, hey, we looked at your calendar, you're busy today, you got to do this thing. It's like, hey, you've talked to us about these things. You might be interested in this. The Tolkien thing went through me for a moment, but then if you look over here somewhere, I believe you should be able to see. I don't know where it is in here. It's yeah. I one of the you know starter prompts I try is like, hey, I want to read the Tolkien books.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:44]:
Like what's the best way to go? So it knows I talked about Tolkien or asked it about Tolkien. So it's kind of bringing that up, and it's bringing it up more than once too, actually. But if you go through here, you'll see things. In my case, because we go to Mexico, so there's some Mexico stuff in here, and I'm sure I did a Mexico City itinerary somewhere in here. Same, this is also Mexico City, and then also, well, Mexico, but near Mexico City, and then some random sports-related things. Kind of interesting, but just kind of a starter series of things. Like, you might want to dive into one of these titles, like, oh, that's kind of interesting. Yeah, I do kind of, I do want to kind of know.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:20]:
About this. And of course you can personalize it and so forth, but I'm not going to bother with that too, too much. Back when we did the previous episode about Copilot, I wanted to talk about shopping because I knew this was coming, but it wasn't available in the Copilot app that I had, and now it is. And so this is a way to do things you've probably seen in other places where you want to know more about a product, you want to get recommendations about the best, you know, whatever it is, smart speaker. You can have it say, you can have it look at the prices for these things and alert you when, you know, the price goes below a certain amount, that kind of thing. So just kind of a nice, you know, front end for, you know, all your shopping needs, I guess, if that's what you're into. But interesting. It's interesting.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:01]:
And then the Learn view, which is just a consolidation of things that are elsewhere in Copilot. And to my mind, often just in notebooks, what used to be called projects, right? So it's a direct way to create a quiz or a flashcard and do other things. And if you scroll down here, you'll see it's just kind of an all-up view of the, of the various things you've used that may or may not be related to learning something. And hey, you know, here you go. And then you get some prompts. So if you want to go in here and, you know, get started on a new project, which we'll now call notebook, they've given you some startup prompts in here as well. So that's, that's kind of cool. So a lot going on here.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:43]:
More to come, like I said. But let me leave you with this notion because this is kind of interesting to me. I wrote an article about this fairly recently, but Microsoft over the past 40-ish years has obviously updated Windows a lot, but they've also tried to replace it a lot. And none of those efforts have succeeded except for one, when they replaced the old DOS-based version of Windows with Windows NT, right back in the late 1990s into the 2000s with Windows 2000 and then XP. But in more recent years, there's been things like, well, could we, could we, Microsoft, make a Chrome OS type thing but using Microsoft Edge, right? So they looked at that. Right now they're investigating whether or not it makes sense to make an extension of that that would use Copilot as the shell. So where you're interacting with Copilot instead of all of the normal Windows UI elements. Whether or not that ever happens is kind of hard to say, but I will just say, you know, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella multiple times has referred to Copilot as sort of the new Start button or Start menu.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:45]:
When Microsoft launched this new version of the app, they referred to it as your OS for work. There is this little guy up here I didn't mention earlier, by the way, which is a way to launch apps but also other things. Create is just a front end to what used to be, I think it was called Imagine. And so this is a way you can go in and create graphics, you know, using a prompt, pretty basic stuff. And then the Office Agent, which gives you this of split-screen view. And I sort of assumed when I saw this that this would only be available for commercial customers, but actually it's available to everybody, or well, possibly everybody with a subscription, I should say, because I do have a subscription. But a way to interact with an agent in the cloud that's not your personal agent, just an agent. And you can do things like you would in chat, but using whatever the context is of the thing that's on the left as an additional input or source.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:36]:
So this is a little bit like a Start menu, isn't it? And with a search box, you know, it's got that kind of thing. So will there be some future version of Copilot where it becomes sort of an OS? Maybe, maybe. Microsoft does have an internal project called Project Aeon where they're doing just that. It doesn't mean it's coming out. It doesn't mean they're going to give it a shot. But I do see things in here. I'm like, you know, this becomes almost like the shell of the OS, like almost what you would think of as an OS. The only thing it really can't do natively itself is run Windows apps, right? But, um, in that video, the internal video that Microsoft made, they, they run them through Windows 365, which is a cloud service, right? So you can run those things on a VM in the cloud.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:19]:
So it's a possibility. Um, so we'll see what happens there, but baby steps first. Uh, we've got this new redesigned app. They're going to add those 3 main views soon. That will do another video by the time that happens, because that's going to be a big deal. And we're going to move this thing into the agentic era kicking and screaming, which is how I'm going to be going. But I'll be sure to keep up on it so I can tell you guys about it. So you get this automatically.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:46]:
If you have Copilot on your computer, you haven't uninstalled it, you'll just get this update. By the time you see this, you've definitely gotten it. And then sometime in the weeks or months ahead, we'll, you know, we'll get those 3 tabs and things are going to change again. So We'll be back with more soon. Thank you for watching. We'll have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more about the podcast at twit.tv/how. Thank you again for watching.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:11]:
Thank you everybody for watching, but thank you especially to our Club Twit members. We love you guys. If you're not a member, please do consider joining. You can find out more about that program at twit.tv/clubtwit. Thanks. See you next week.