Transcript
Paul Thurott (0:01)
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to look at the two copilot apps in Windows 11. That's right, there are two. Now, I know.
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Paul Thurott (0:17)
This is Twit. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurat and this week we're going to look at, at the two Copilot apps in Windows 11. And yeah, you. You heard that correct? There is. There are two copilot apps in Windows because one was not enough. I spent about a year between late 2023 and late 2024 freaking out because Microsoft added a copilot app to Windows 11, which wouldn't normally be a big deal, but then they spent that ensuing year changing it dramatically on a really regular basis. We'll talk about that in a moment. But in late last year, late 2024, it got even stranger because now there are two copilot apps in Windows 11. So we'll take a look at why that happened and then we'll see what each of those apps does so you can determine whether you want to use them. Okay, so the first of the two is, and I put them both down here in the taskbar because, you know, I want to make myself crazy, is the original Copilot app. Right? So you may recall if you did use this app, I'll just try to resize this so it looks normal on this little screen. This is the successor, I guess, to that app that debuted in late 2023. The original version of this app, it was actually a pain over on the side of the screen, right? And it was non resizable, but then it became resizable and then you could turn it into a floating window and used to have all these like Windows command integrations and that was going to get better, but then they took that away and then it became a native app. But it's not really a native app. It's just a. A native app wrapper around the web app that it always was. And whatever it's. It's hard to keep track of, but the app icon moved four times. It was here, it was there, it was everywhere. Microsoft tried all this different stuff. So rather than fret over that, I'll just say this is the app as it is today. So this is the native app. It's really just a native app wrap around a web app. It's a front end to Copilot on the web. So built into Windows you do all the copiloty type things that you want to do, whatever that might be. I'll give you a couple of ideas, I guess, but the way to think of this is Copilot is one of many modern AI companions that are replacements for what we used to call personal digital assistants. Things like Cortana or Siri, which is still around, or Google Assistant. Right. And so it's very similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT. In fact, it's based on that. It's similar to Gemini, which is the new Google AI Assistant. Siri is getting there. Apple is doing things on their own schedule, but they'll get there. I've already configured this, but one of the things it does is it asks you to configure a keyboard shortcut for Alt plus space to bring up what's called the Quick View version of this. I don't like that. As kind of a power user, Alt space normally does what I'm doing here, which is right click on the current window so you can move the thing around if it's off, you know, to the side of the screen or whatever. It's kind of useful for people like me that have been around for a long time and remember that, but most people don't use it. So I have actually configured it to work that way on this computer, which I'm a little unsettled by. But anyway, so Alt space, you can see this is the Quick View version. So it's kind of the small, it just appears over whatever else you're doing. So the point of this is that you're probably someone in Copilot because you're in the middle of something. Maybe you're on a website or at an app, you have a question about whatever it might be, you can ask it this question and then help space it goes away. So that's, that's, that's cool. So what might you use this silly app for? Right. Well, you could use it for things like, you know, ask it for recipes. You're looking, you know, typically it's the answer to a question. You want information about something. You know, I would like a good recipe for herb carrot cake. I probably spelled carrot wrong. Yep. So, but whatever. So it comes back pretty quick. Right? Nice. Definitely going to want to check this one, make sure it's not hallucinating about a, an ingredient in there. But I don't know. Looks, I'm going to go through that one quick. Looks pretty solid. I, I, this one's kind of weird now because actually I'm writing a book about Mexico City, but in the past I would always ask for Mexico City itineraries. You could do a travel itinerary. So maybe I'll do one for. I don't want to. I don't use AI for the book, but 5 day Paris itinerary, for example, a 10 or area if I could type. You know, we'll do a little thinking and here we go. All right. Of Paris, etc. Etc. You know, same kind of thing. You get it. So you could do budgeting with this, a workout program. You know, one of the things I'm. I'm here in Mexico City, I don't have a gym here I can go to. So you know, I need a. A body weight workout program kind of thing. Probably will come up with something reasonable. It's like Paul, you weigh a lot, so this is going to work great. It gives me different things over some number of days. Pretty cool standard if you're a developer. I use this for a lot of C programming things actually. This is built in the C Write a C method to pull the numbers out of a string, right? So you have a string that's comprised of alphanumeric characters. You just want the number parts. Here's a line of code, or not a line of code, a block of code. This is actually a function in C shop, but whatever. This is a different way to do that. And yeah, fun. So presentation's nice. By the way, you probably noticed this thing came up pretty quick, right? This stuff is much better than it used to be. So. So your use case here will vary. I don't use this type of interface myself a lot, frankly, although I do use the programming capabilities in GitHub Copilot, which is based on this inside Visual Studio. But this is just kind of your general purpose assistant.