In this post, I will share my first impressions of the Microsoft Windows 11 copilot powered by Bing chat. This article will help you to get started so that you can explore Microsoft copilot for yourself.
I’m excited about the potential benefits of having an AI tool built into Microsoft Windows, but the question is how much control it has over your computer hardware.
Using Windows 11 Copilot
At the time of writing, copilot is in pre-release but is available to all. The Icon is located on the toolbar next to Windows search. Clicking the icon will open Windows copilot to the left of the screen, and any opened windows are adjusted to fit the rest of the screen.
Windows 11 Copilot features
Windows Copilot is built on Bing chat and is based on OpenAI GPT4 technology. It is what is known as a Large Language model (LLM). A large language model is a type of Artificial Intelligence trained to generate text in a way that makes sense.
A large language model like the one used in Windows co-pilot can help you brainstorm ideas, summarise text, and ask questions about specific subjects to help you with research. It can even help you to write computer code. I regularly use them to help me lay out future blog posts, including this one.
Why don’t we ask the Windows co-pilot how it thinks it can help Windows users?
Known problems with Windows 11 Copilot
The Large Language model is an interesting technology with many potential uses. It does have one problem all users have to be aware of. It can lie the output generated by the model may be a work of fiction. A behaviour the developers call hallucination.
Hallucination is partly due to the algorithm underlying the Large Language model to predict the next word it should use in the answer. Providing correct information is less of a consideration for the model.
So you should double-check any output from a Large Language model AI you rely on.
Windows 11 Copilot future developments
As I mentioned earlier, Windows 11 co-pilot uses Bing Chat, and the underlying technology of Bing Chat is an open AI GPT4 Large Language Model. There has been a lot of speculation, and Open AI has confirmed that GPT 5 will be released in 2024.
Large language models will continue to be developed in the long run, driven by competition from other large model AI applications such as Google Bard.
Conclusion
For Windows users, it brings a large language model to your desktop. It would be cool if it could interact with applications installed on your desktop. It can’t, which makes you question how integrated the Windows co-pilot actually is?
I, for one, won’t be using it as I find the Bing chatbot more limiting and less effective than Google Bard, which helped me lay out this post. You can find out more about my experiences of using Google Bard here.