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Hands-On Windows 137: MIA Windows 11 Features
00:17:30
Click to Do, Recall, Semantic Search
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Transcript9 lines
- [00:00]
Paul Throt
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a look at some features that Microsoft announced, is actively testing, but has never delivered in.
- [00:09]
Unknown
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- [01:13]
Paul Throt
Race the rudders. Race the sails. Race the sails. Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching.
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Unknown
Over.
- [01:20]
Paul Throt
Roger, wait. Is that an enterprise sales solution?
- [01:24]
Unknown
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- [01:49]
Paul Throt
This is TWIT everybody, and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Throt, and this week we're going to take a slight diversion. We talk a lot about these new features that are coming to Windows 11 or are in Windows 11. And this week I'm going to talk about some that aren't in Windows 11. And what I mean by that is that since at least last September or so, Microsoft has been testing various features for Windows 11, some of them copilot plus PC specific, some not actively in the Windows Insider program. But they've never come to the stable version of Windows 11. Not yet. I had gone through an enormous exercise of trying to figure out everything Microsoft's announced. Was it released, and if so, you know, when and how did that happen? And the list of features that haven't been released yet is actually surprisingly long. So I thought I'd go through not the entire list, but some of the bigger ones. So I'm going to start with the Copilot plus PC features. The most obvious is Recall, which Microsoft announced last May and then release. No, it didn't. It was going to release it in June and Preview. But then there was a big kerfuffle over that and eventually it was released for Snapdragon X based copilot plus PCs in preview in the dev channel of the Windows Insider program in November and I think later in November or in December, it came to intel and AMD based PCs. I don't have it installed in this computer. I don't really think we need to go over it again. I think you understand it, but kind of a cool feature if you want this kind of a thing. Still not available, but tied to that is a related feature called Click to Do. When Microsoft first showed this off, it was a feature of Recall. It was only available in Recall, but now it's available everywhere. So I'm just running Microsoft Edge. This is an article that I wrote recently. As I record this, there's a couple of ways you can invoke this thing. And the big one is hold down the Windows key and press the mouse button. You get that little AI effect. You can also do Windows Key Q which used to be a shortcut for search, but now it's just Windows key +S. So when you do this, what you get is the ability to find things on the screen. And so in this case, what we're seeing is a lot of text, obviously. And so the options that we're going to see up here, that's for recall, it's not going to work. Are going to be text related, right? And so I can type in a word, I could type it incorrectly perhaps and it will highlight the instances of that word. That's pretty cool. And I can also right click and then I get these things called app actions. And these are specific to the type of content that we're looking at. So in this case what we're looking at is text. And so I can click summarize and it will summarize the text that you see there on screen. Now this will be interesting because it's, it's got some kind of accessory text over the side, but you can see how slowly this is moving. That's because this is happening on the mpu. This is a feature that requires a Copilot plus PC. So this is a local. This is a local feature. It's funny how it's summarizing an individual that would be me decided to enroll their Surface Laptop 7 in Windows 11's Dev Channel of the inside. Okay, you get the idea. So same thing with. I could just turn this off. Sorry. You could do the same thing with graphics. You'll get different options based on graphics, not a big deal. Since they started testing this, there have been a couple of additions to this and one of them is this place and settings. So it's apps actions and then you get this list of apps that can recommend actions. Right. And so over time what we're going to see is more of this kind of thing. And so both of these happen to be image related, but you could from that action menu that you see in, click to do these things and it would actually load the app. It doesn't just happen as a service, but they're starting to integrate these things on the back end. And so that's actually, that's actually pretty cool. One of the other features we don't have yet, this one kind of surprised me because I thought this was there. I'll just make this smaller is Co Create. So if you look at this Copilot menu in Paint, you'll see the four features that are generative AI related. Some are cloud based, some are local. Co Creator is a local feature. So this is a Copilot plus PC feature. Image Creator, Generative, Erase and Remove, background are all cloud based AI. Meaning that those features will work a lot on any computer. But on this one, because I do have a Copilot plus PC, I can click into this. So there's a couple of ways you can use this. You could have an image already loaded and in fact maybe that might be not a horrible choice. I'll just do this one. I have to resize it because I already know that this is not or it's too big for Paint's Generative AI features. Let me make sure it's still a little too big. Let me do that again. Let's make that like 80% as big. Okay, so now you got this image, image of the sky, whatever. So you could say, you know, add a lot of colorful balloons. I could also, as I do this draw in here. And so you could do a combination of things. Now this has done this. I could add this to this image like so. And if I was smart I would have done this layer. But I didn't. But you get the idea. So. And then we have these other generative AI features. These are the ones that don't require a Copilot plus PC but interesting idea. The quality of the images you get out of Co Creator is not awesome. It's not as good as the best cloud based AIs because it's running locally, but it's kind of a neat, unique feature. I think it's only going to get better over time. Microsoft does update those models all the time. So potentially interesting, but something that we don't yet have. Ditto for a bunch of the features in Paint. We've looked at some of this stuff in the past, obviously. In fact, maybe the better way to do this would be to just find an image. Let's see what we can do with this one. So just open this in the photos app here. So this is an image of an Xbox backbone controller for a phone edit. The features we see in here are going to vary by computer type. So you know, background blur, remove, replace. Any computer can do that. But these two here at the end require copilot plus PCs. Neither one of these is available. I signed in earlier. But neither one of these is available yet in stable for some reason. So restyle image is where you take this image, you can add to it like we did in co creator, or you can just choose a style and it will do this local AI running off the mpu, examine the image and then turn it into this fun impressionist painting of an Xbox background controller, which actually looks pretty cool. Ditto for super resolution. Right. Which we demoed on an earlier show. So you get the idea there. But not available in stable. Still months later. Right.
- [09:07]
Unknown
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- [09:37]
Paul Throt
Semantic search. So this is the one that I know is coming soon as of this recording. So in the patch Tuesday that we're we will have in April 2025, Microsoft actually is going to add this feature. It's called semantic search. So if you've ever used search in Windows, you know how terrible it is. But if I went to search, it brings up the search box which has search highlights. I start typing. I typed Windows so you can see it down there. I type Windows. If you don't have the search box here, you have a search box up here. I could go to Documents and it will try to find documents that have the term windows in them. But the way that semantic search works is it uses AI to examine the contents of documents and images to try to find those things. And so theoretically I could type Something like, I don't know for a fact that there are any images that have mountains in them or whatever and say, documents, webs, I guess we'll call these documents. You know, this doesn't work very well, right? So even though I've had this on this computer for months, doesn't work great. But the one thing I have found is that it works a little bit better in File Explorer because this is the other major place where this type of thing shows up. So I'm just going to go to where my photos actually are and I will type in mountain and see what it does. But in my experience, for the most part, it's just looking. This is not semantic search, right? This is just file name search. So at some point this is going to work like AI search is supposed to work, by looking, you know, use, understanding the metadata behind these images, understanding the contents of these images, and hopefully bringing them up in search. It's going to be shipping to stable any second now, so this should be happening. It can work with cloud files, which is OneDrive only, although that will be different in the future too. They're going to open it up to third parties. So if you use Dropbox or Google Drive or iCloud or whatever, you should be able to use it with that. It works with local files. Actually, the one thing interesting there is understanding what is getting indexed here, right? And so if you go into Settings, I have this set to Classic, which I haven't changed on purpose because it should be fine. You can see it's actually, it's still not done. Maybe that's my problem, but it's indexing the important parts of the file system to me. I suppose I could add the OneDrive folder, but it should already be working and it's not. So if you want to ensure this works, you could turn on, enhance. This will index your entire computer. It's going to take a while. Like it says here, it should be plugged in. I'm not going to do that obviously now, but something interesting to try looking through the rest of this. Unfortunately, I suspect I can't demo too many of these, but. And oddly, and this is something we've talked about a bunch with Windows 11 these days because of the way Microsoft rolls things out. Even though this computer has been around for a while, it doesn't actually have all of these features, even though I've used them on other PCs or maybe other people have them on their PCs that are in the Insider program. But when you go into where Paul accounts and then sign in Options. You know, depending on the computer you're going to have two to three or I should say one to three Windows hello options. Right. Everyone gets a pin. Everyone has to have a pin. In fact, if you sign in with a Microsoft account or a different online account, but depending on your computer, you might also have facial recognition and fingerprint recognition. This computer has facial but not fingerprint. So I've already enrolled in that and I can go in and change it etc. If I wanted to. But they are modernizing the interface for this. This is not something I can easily show, but the, the basics here. If you want to run something like Recall or this, some security feature, you'll get a Windows hello pop up. It's possible we'll see one later in the show or in the next show. And that interface is being updated. It's cleaner, it's simpler, it's faster than the interface you're probably seeing today on your computer. But it's not shipping and stable so people just don't have that yet. Open File Explorer. There's a new home view here. I'm actually going to re enable some options here because I usually just turn all this stuff off for performance reasons. But this bit here, I'm curious. Yeah, I don't have anything Shared is new. So we've had recent. We've had favorites in the future they're actually going to remove this and replace it with a new recommended section because you can still access your quick access folders over here. But new in the past few months. No, I'm sorry, it's not new in the past few months. It's not new yet. You don't have it yet. But Microsoft has been testing us. In fact, this one is the oldest one. This, that I've. That I can find. This started testing in September of 2024. It's still not unstable, but with a Microsoft account, which is what I've signed in here. If anyone has shared files with you through OneDrive you will see them here. No one has. So I don't have anything here. And of course I'm just. I mean I turn this off just for performance reasons. But they keep kind of messing around with this interface I think just trying to make it more useful. So that's probably more useful I guess tied to that is something called OneDrive resume. And the idea there is a kind of a continuity like feature if you have an iPhone and a Mac or whatever where in this case maybe you were looking at a document or an image or whatever it was in the OneDrive app on your phone. And when you go to your computer and sign in, you'll get a pop up that says, oh, you were doing this thing on your phone. Do you want to continue that? It's a good idea. I've never seen it. I haven't been able to test it. I've tried. So it will come on at some point, but they've been testing that one since February. It's not unstable. Eventually we'll get there then. A couple of new sharing features. I feel like one of these I might have demoed, which is interesting because I'm not seeing it here on this particular computer, but if you right click a pinned application in the taskbar like Word, where you can see these documents, Documents, this is called a jump list, right? And so these are documents I apparently accessed recently using Microsoft Word. And actually you can see there's a bunch of OneNote stuff in here. And that's because Microsoft just made an announcement about OneNote and I was going back and looking at stuff I'd written before. So the point of this is that you can click on one of these documents and go right to that. It just opens in the app. The thing you're not seeing here and the thing I have seen in the past but is not on this computer now for some reason is a share icon. So in addition to this pin icon, you'll get a share icon. And if you click that, it will open the share pane and you can go from there to share it through, you know, nearby sharing a compatible app, whatever it might be. So again, just kind of thinking through how people might use these features. Not, not a horrible idea. And to find attend it with another terrific demo of Nothing is another feature I'm not seeing on this computer. But they've been testing this one since March, which is sharing directly to apps from File Explorer. So today if you have an like I've selected this file and I could click share and it brings up the share pane, right? And then you get, you know, here's the list of apps that you can share with, some of which are installed, some of which I could install. I could go to nearby sharing and then see, you know, my phone and whatever, whatever other computers are available on my home network. But you can also right click and do share. And this interface you're seeing is the common interface. This is what everyone has today. It just says share and it does the same thing, right? It brings up this menu. But what they're going to do, what they are doing is adding a Sub menu to this. So instead of just share, it's going to have a list of the apps. So if you look at Open with, this is an example of what it would look like is you could share directly to not these apps, but the apps that are compatible with the file that I'm trying to share. So when we go into share, you can see I could share this to Notepad, which actually doesn't make any sense, Paint snipping tool, Copilot, and then you can install these other apps. Right. So again, just trying to save some steps. The idea is if you actually use share, and I feel like I'm sometimes I'm the only person who does that, you can right click on this share and then go right out to that app because maybe that's a common workflow for you when you share, you typically do it the same way every single time. Like I actually use nearby sharing all the time. And this used to be directly available, but now it's a submenu and it's kind of a little convoluted. So that will not be on that menu. That would be too simple, I guess. But for sharing with apps, they actually, they're going to make that a lot easier than it is today. So kind of a mixed bag here. I would say most of the major stuff is Copilot plus PC related, so it's not going to impact everyone. The only one of these that I mentioned, like I said, that I know is coming soon, is semantic search, which you may see before you see this episode, depending on when you watch it. The other ones, your guess is as good as mine. So hopefully sometime soon we'll eventually get some, some some of these new features for Windows 11. I'm sure sometime in 2025. So thank you so much for watching. We'll have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. Thursday you can find out more at TWiT TV. H thank you especially to our Club Twit members. If you're watching on YouTube, be sure to consider at least joining Club Twit. It's inexpensive, gets rid of the ads, lots of other perks, including of course, ad free access to all of Twit's other excellent podcasts. So please do consider that and I will see you next week.