Paul Perrott (5:59)
So that's how you manage it. But where, where do you see these things like where, where, where do AI credits kind of come up in the UI in Windows? Because they, they're starting to show up. It's kind of strange. A couple of different places. So Notepad for one, we talked about some of the rewrite capabilities. You'll see it there. Paint photos, right? Actually, if you go to the Microsoft Designer website, which is what you use to. Well, among other things to create images using generative AI, I usually go for like a widescreen image here. Yeah, I'll just try an example so they can give us a goofy example. But you'll see a notion of this. But as this thing is generating using all the fun AI colors up here, you can see this little stack of coins is what it looks like to me. These are, this is your AI credit usage tracking icon. So if I click this, it's actually going to go back to that same page we just looked at. It will go back to the, the micro. This page here on the Microsoft this page here. Right. So actually if I refresh this, I wouldn't be surprised to see this has gone down to 34 because I just used to create an image I'm never going to use. But let's see what happens. So yeah, see it just went down the credit. So there you go. So these images are kind of cool. I have no idea what it made. I wasn't really paying attention to the prompt. Usually I would type in something very specific and you can see some of the images I created in the past, including this set here, which I never actually ended up using because it looked kind of creepy to me. But usually this thing does a really good job. So that's kind of fun. One little asterisk about Designer. If you do not pay for a Microsoft 365 subscription, they actually give you some number of credits toward these generative images every month as well. I think it might be seven. So even if you don't pay, you can actually use Designer. It's the one thing that I'm going to show today that even someone not paying at all can actually access. So I will close these out. That is fine. So we looked at Notepad before. Notepad's kind of fun. And we talked about this rewrite capability. These are the new AI capabilities. But you can see there's a little picture here of my head, right? And one of the things you see here is that AI credit balance. Because every time you do something with AI in this app, it's going to go against that balance. And so again, if I were to click this, it's going to go back to that exact same page. So I'm not going to bother with that. But let's paste in some text from Typora. So I just wrote something, something, something. Is there anything fun in here? No, no, no, no. I guess it doesn't really matter, but I'll just. Yeah, let's just use this. So this is just a news story I wrote earlier today. So it's pretty short actually. Let me do that again. I want to copy that cleanly because you don't want extra code in there. So let me do that again. Okay, so paste that in there. Still got code. Okay, that's okay. So you've seen these things, right? And so you can make the shorter, you can make it longer, you can change the tone, make it more casual, humorous, whatever. You can also do this on a paragraph or just selection by selection basis. Or for example, if I go into this last one, I can do it from there. You can see the rewrite stuff is available there as well. I could change this entire. My favorite demo, I will never use this for anything in real life, is to turn this into a poem, which to me reads more like a Dr. Seuss story, but kind of a sing songy kind of a way, you know, to support ASL learning and accessible AI applications, bridging the gap with innovative creations. You know, it's really cool. And here again, you can see this little AI credit balance, right? They're kind of putting it in front of you. I think they're just trying to get people used to this notion. So I think. I know we looked at this UI earlier, but you know, you get three choices. You get a couple of options here for copying on the clipboard, regenerating, etc. But over here, again, you're going to see this AI credit balance. And if I were to go check, because I've done yet another useless thing with this, I will be down to 33. Right. Because I've done a couple of things here. All right, so we talked about that. We talked about paint as well. Paint is a strange one because there's a new Copilot icon. There's up to four options here. It depends on what kind of computer you have. You'll get all four with a Copilot plus PC. Some of these things are free and hopefully will remain free. I believe only one of these involves AI credits. So if I turn it, like co creator, for example, I believe this is a Copilot plus PC feature. I paid for that computer. It has an mpu. They're not going to charge me anymore for that or put credits against it. So that doesn't have it. Generative Erase is a fairly new feature. I actually would have to open a document for that to make any sense. So let me do that. And we probably looked at this one before, but, you know, if I wanted to make this bigger, you know, remove the people in the background, apply, I'd probably go on down to 32 credits, I would guess right now and then. But there's no mention here of those credits. Right. Which is kind of interesting. So it's not clear right now. I'm not actually 100% sure if these actions are going against that credit set that you get every month. Actually, I'm not really sure because they're not calling it out. The one that I am sure of is the image. Imagery is image credit. Right. So this is. This actually has. You can see down here the little AI credits balance. Now again, I'll just click on it for the heck of it. It's going to go to some. See where the number is now. It loads very slowly. I'm sorry, but I've been playing around with AI a little bit since we started recording the show. And survey says where am I? Yep, still at 33. That's pretty good. Okay, and then photos. And so photos. Let me just close. This guy is actually probably better just to open a. An image directly into photos. So I'll use that same image and photos and this app is. This app, if anything has even more going on, if it would just open. Let me try that again. Okay, wrong window, but here we go. Okay, so when we. We talked about this before too, in one of the previous episodes, this edit with Designer, which loads the entire Designer UI into this app, which is kind of interesting, but if you go into Edit, you'll see a variety of AI editing features, not all of which are called out that way, which is kind of interesting. So Generative Erase, for some reason doesn't have this little AI logo on it, but it's absolutely an AI feature. It's very similar to what we just did in Microsoft Paint. It works a little more automatically, which I'd say I like. Background removal, you can do blur or just completely remove the background. That stuff works really well. This is Restyle image, which I believe is Copilot plus PC specific. So you're not really going to see an AI credit anything here. But again, you can use all these different styles to create an abstract impressionistic version of the photo or whatever you want to do. And then the latest feature, which I know we did demo recently, super resolution. So in fact, this was one of the one. This was the image I used to. I think I supersized this up by at least 2 or 3x, I don't recall. But nothing in here about AI credits. So I think that's going to change in the same way that I think Paint is going to update a little bit to be a little more specific about what and what doesn't incur some kind of a cost. I think you're going to see that in photos as well. Right now, today as I record this, there's nothing there. So going back to those two Copilot apps, which doesn't want to load for some reason. So the main Copilot app is that Chatbot. At the time we recorded the episode about those two apps, this chat interface was not available for consumers, but it is now. So if you sign into this app with a business account, you will get this basic ui. I think these icons will be gone, but otherwise it should be about the same. And when you sign in now with a consumer account, you'll get these as well. And so this provides most of the features you get from the normal Copilot app. Right. You can just chat with it, ask you questions, etc. It doesn't have to be anything about your work documents or anything you're doing over here, but you can use it kind of as a chat. The one thing it doesn't have is an obvious way to bring in an image or a document, although I suspect you could just drag it, drag it in. So that's. That's new. That's new to the past 30 days. Ish. But as you click around here and you look at the different capabilities that are inside here, specifically around creating new documents or images. About somewhere out here is a. Oh, I just went by. It is the designer aspect, which goes out to the web app. There's nothing, there's no mention of AI credits in here. So for this app to make a lot of sense to most people, you would have to have this Microsoft 365 subscription. You could go into my content, see a list of these are a list of some of the documents I brought up most recently, all of the apps you have available to you across Microsoft 365, etc. But there is no mention in this UI anywhere of AI credits. Right. It doesn't matter where you click, you'll never see it. And I have. I think that's going to have to change as well. So for Today we see AI credits in some parts of the Windows UI but not in others. Apps like Copilot and Photos Copilot365 or Microsoft 365 Copilot can be updated at any time. So it's possible that by the time you see this episode, this could have changed. So this is something I'm going to be looking at because I'm really curious where the line between free requires credits and a paid subscription is right now. It's not completely clear. Depending on the app, I think it's. It's pretty clear in Paint, it's really clear in Notepad, it's not so clear in Designer, and it's absolutely not clear at all in Photos or in Microsoft 365 Copilot, but it's Windows, so these things are going to change. So I'm sure by the time we come back in a few episodes that will already be different. So hopefully you found this confusing. No. Informational, educational, entertaining, whatever. But you know, this stuff is in flux. But we will have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more at TWiT TV handle HRW thank you so much for watching. Thank you especially to our club Twit subscribers. We love you and we ask everyone, if you're watching this on YouTube or wherever else are listening to the audio version, please consider subscribing, support the channel, support all the podcasts that they make and that we make, and not just Hands on Windows, but all of the great content that is occurring through Twitter. So thank you if you are subscribing. Thank you for watching and I'll see you next week. Geico's motorcycle expertise gives me the coverage I need. Like 247 claims I'm on cloud nine.
