B (9:15)

Hey, everybody. Leo Laporte here with a little bit of an ask. Every year at this time, we'd like to survey our audience to find a little bit more about you. As you may know, we respect your privacy. We don't do anything, in fact, we can't do anything to learn about who you are. And that's fine with me. I like that. But it helps us with advertising, it helps us with programming to know a little bit about those of you who are willing to Tell us your privacy is absolutely respected. We do get your email address, but that's just in case there's an issue. We don't share that with anybody. What we do share is the aggregate information that we get from these surveys. Things like 80% of our audience buy something they heard in an ad on our shows, or 75% of our audience are IT decision makers. Things like that are very helpful with us when we talk to advertisers. They're also very helpful to us to understand what operating systems you use, what content you're interested in. So, enough. Let me just ask you if you will go to TWiT TV Survey 26 and answer a few questions. It should only take you a few minutes of your time. We do this every year. It's very helpful to us. Your privacy is assured, I promise you. And of course, if you're uncomfortable with any question or you don't want to do it at all, that's fine too. But if you want to help us out a little bit, twit TV survey 26, thank you so much. And now back to the show.

A (10:39)

There's also been a lot of improvements in Windows 11 to the settings app. And then this is an app that doesn't get a lot of love. I use it every day. I use it all day long. I'm very familiar with it. But I feel like most people only come in here when they have to, and they're probably a little bit confused, confused by it. There's probably thousands and thousands of options in here. So Settings has often had, or has long had this search capability. If you have a Copilot plus PC, you'll see this kind of blue, purple, pink, you know, AI coloring here. And that means that you get this. It's like an a. It's an AI agent for Settings. But a lot of these capabilities are just available to anyone. And to me, the big thing is the ability to search and get the answer in line. So instead of getting results, you can just do a natural language search. You don't know the name of the feature. Maybe. So, for example, if I want to do something with the screen brightness, maybe it's too bright, so I want to dim the screen. You type in something like dim, and it will give you results that you can click on and that will go to a place in Settings. But it also provides interface, or in this case, two interfaces to adjust the underlying settings right here without having to go into the thing. Right. And this is a really good example of what AI is like when it works and what I mean by that is it's saving you time. Right. And you don't have to master this tool. You have to. You could do this from Search in the start menu as well. But the basic idea here is that you don't have to become an expert in the Settings app. You just. I want to do this one time and I want to be done. I don't want to take a course in it. Right. And so I could, you know, I could use this to dim the screen, etc. Etc. I'm not going to do that, but. And it works with whatever, you know, you. I'm. I'm in dark mode right now, but I. You might want to do something like. Well, I don't know how to do that thing, so I'm actually already in it. So it's already. It's already there. But perhaps if I type light mode or something. Yeah, so same idea. I can change the theme to the light theme and I can choose how this mode works here. So I don't have to know where that is. I do know where it is. Right. I know exactly where to go. But you might not know and someone else might not know. And a lot of kind of normal mainstream users aren't going to know. And so this is a nice little front end to something that for a lot of people I think is kind of a daunting task, frankly. So that's kind of cool. The fourth one is just new AI capabilities that in Notepad Paint Photos also snipping tool, by the way, although I don't have that in the list. And this one, it's a little cheap because I'm talking about three different apps here. But if you think about like Paint, which was a very, very simplistic app, I did an episode this past year about kind of like a masterclass thing and it's improved since then, but it supports layers like Photoshop. It has the ability to do object selection now that's brand new. And then all of these AI capabilities, some of which you won't see if you don't have a Copilot plus PC, but a lot of them you will. And this is an incredible list. All of a sudden Paint is really, really good at removing the background from an image. For example, image creation skills capabilities, rather Copilot plus PC, you get co creator. This one's kind of neat because you can type in a prompt for what you want and then you can draw a little picture and it will do like a, well, a cartoon. 2. Photographic rendition of that little stick Drawing you just made, etc. This is an impressive app. Like this is really, really neat. And to me I just, I love this app. Photos very similar in that it's gaining all of these AI capabilities. This is more of a photo management app, but it also has those editing capabilities. So what you're seeing here is a pop up for a brand new to this computer capability for image categorization. I'm going to allow that and I believe we should be able to see what those categories are. Yeah, here they are. So identity notes, receipts and screenshots. Right. And so if I just go to screenshots I don't have, it's still trying to find all my photos. So I just turn it on. But that's kind of a neat capability. But if I go back to the normal gallery and here's a picture of a hamburger. So that's exciting and I will. There's all these capabilities. We've talked through a bunch of this stuff. But if I go into edit, you'll see all of the AI based editing capabilities. So these things over here just kind of, you know, you standard things. Adjustments and auto enhancements. The ability to kind of write it right on the picture, but generative erase where you can select things and erase things arbitrarily. So maybe I wanted like something like this. I don't want there. Right. Because it's like a crumb on the plate there. All right, so that was nice background removal. It will suggest it. And then you can also do remove, replace or blur. I make it do blur here, which. Okay. Restyle. And this is, this is an amazing feature. Actually. This is now available in paint as well. So if you want to see this. Oops. Oh, I think this is screwed up. It's usually a great feature, but you could do this as a cartoon, as a Renaissance painting, you know, whatever. So that's really cool. This one is actually my favorite. I've used this a bunch. This is particularly good if you're like me and you have these old scanned photos that are really low res but you want them to be, you know, 4K or whatever. This is already 4K. I don't need to do this. But you could bump it up to 2x3x whatever. And this does a terrific job. It's amazing. Absolutely amazing. And then relight. And this one's a little complex but you're going to have three light sources and you can kind of change how this thing is lit, which is crazy. Excuse me, for a 2D image, but really cool. I don't know that Notepad is my favorite app in Windows, but it might be. I do use Notepad every day. In fact, I like this app so much, I'm writing my own version of it and I've been working on that for a long time. There are new features in this app that have nothing to do with AI. Like the markdown support, which is the. What you see here in the toolbar. But there is this kind of co pilot menu here. I don't have anything loaded, so that's going to be part of that problem. So let me go find like a. I'll just find a random. The sample things that I've been working with. Yeah, like this is a markdown document that I wrote back in whatever month several months ago. And once you have something loaded now, you get all these options so you can do a summary. You can make it shorter, make it longer, change the tone. I think I must have showed you the demo where you turn it into a poem. This is unbelievable. It's pointless, but it's. It's really fun. This is a great example of. I think people saw Microsoft kind of messing around with this app. It's like, what are you doing? What are you doing? And it's like, no, they're doing it. They're doing a good job with it. If you don't want that stuff, by the way, you can just turn it off. It's in Settings. Just turn it off. You don't have to have it, you know, so it's, it's good for everybody. If you don't need it, you don't need it. If you want to turn off the markdown support, you can do that. That's what this is here. I leave that stuff on. I actually use it. I. I actually think this is a pretty impressive application. All right, now I got to think about how I'm going to do this. Let me bring up my website. I did want to call out some Copilot plus PC things. I know that these capabilities are not available to everybody, but if you do have a Copilot plus PC, you get a kind of a growing laundry list of capabilities related to local AI. Right. Things that can run off the mpu. And when these first appeared about a year and a half ago, recall was the big one. That's proven to be actually a lot less interesting and also less controversial than people. People thought. But to me, the big one is something called Click to do and soup. Screw it up. So you hold down the Windows key and you click. And what it will do is because it's highlighting other screens, you can't see it. What it normally does is highlight whatever is on screen. Let me try that again. It's weird, it's funny. Oh, there it goes. Okay, so before it was just doing the other screens. And depending what you see here, you get a different set of capabilities. And these capabilities keep growing over time based on whether it's text or a graphic. Right. And so these are the options for text. Obviously this is familiar. If you just went over the notepad stuff, so I can summarize and do rewriting, I could write a draft based on this paragraph of selected text using Copilot in Microsoft Word, Right. Search, the web, et cetera. So lots of really neat stuff going on there. I, I, this is just a, to me, is a fundamental capability. And the reason is it's built into the system. So you might have. Well, I do I use this, Let me get out of this. I use this app here to write. And this app is pretty bare bones. Right. And so I'm trying to think what I can open here that would be okay. Yeah, this turned into something else. So this is just whatever text. This doesn't have any AI built into it, but with click to do, because I'm running it in Windows, I get those capabilities. Like it's just automatic. I, I love that it makes everything better. So that's a cool feature. It's, it, Is it a reason to buy a new computer? I don't know. Maybe not. All right, so that's five or 12 or whatever number of, of capabilities. But I also wanted to call out an honorable mention because it's not in Windows yet, but it must be coming to Windows. And that's something called the Microsoft Store Multi App install. And so if you run the Store app and you know, in other words, maybe you set up a new computer or maybe just looking for a particular app, whatever it might be, like, you want this, you'd need like a video editor, whatever. You can run the App Store, the Store app, and look for an app, you can search, etc. Etc. If you already know what you want, you can just search for that exact thing. Like, well, actually I was going to search for Chrome. That's not in there. And Brave is probably. No, Brave is in there. So I already have this thing installed, but I could just go here and click it and install it. But a lot of times maybe it's a new PC or whatever it is, you have a list of apps that you want to install. And so they're adding the Ability to add apps to a. It's not a shopping cart exactly, but basically a shopping cart because these are free apps. So you can just kind of go down this list and say install all of these things all at one time. Right. And this is something that I do, but in a much more complex way. In fact, I'm trying to. I'm wondering if I can show this to you easily. But the way that I do this is I have a script, a PowerShell script. And you can see I've had multiple versions of this thing. I guess I'll just open with Notepad so you can at least see it. And you know, this is fairly complicated looking, but this installs apps from the web repository that is behind winget, which is the Windows Package Manager, or from the store, which are these ones down here. So if you have a, like the store ID of a. An app, I should be able to go into here, for example, and type that in. Should bring it up, we'll see. Yeah, that didn't work great. But anyway, that should work. But this is how I bulk install apps. So you can see I've got. Well, you can't see it too well, but there's probably whatever that might be, 10 or 12 apps that I just install in every new computer that I use and review, et cetera. So that's good for me. It's, you know, it's not the type of thing like a normal person would do, but it's, you know, it works for me. But this is a way to do that in a more visual way. Right? Because you're searching. You can search for apps across the store now. It's on the web right now. But this feature is absolutely coming to the store app in Windows. It's just not there yet. But there's no reason you can't do this. Actually, I will. I'll just kick off. I already have that one. I'll just kick this off just to kind of show you what that looks like. So it saves this file. Oh, it just saves you installer in this case. So it's just. You just click on it. Right? And there you go. So it. You could do multiple apps, one click. Go get whatever it is. So it's a neat feature. It's just not in Windows yet. So it's kind of a. It's kind of a. A little preview of one of the many things we're going to get sometime next year. No doubt. So we complain a lot about all of the churn in Windows, all of the updates, all of the Chaos and all that stuff. And it's, that's valid and, you know, we spend time trying to fix that stuff. I talked about tiny 11 builder a few episodes ago. I believe that's a great way to kind of cut down on some of the, you know, harassment and so forth. But, you know, there's also good stuff happening in Windows and I feel like some of the, well, these features that I was just talking about are good examples of those things. Right? Even the ones that some people might have complained about. You know, I don't want. Why is Microsoft touching Notepad? Why are they screwing around with Paint? It's like, actually they're, they're adding some good stuff to those apps. So it's, it's nice to be able to pay attention to that stuff, but it's, it's also nice to kind of look at it and say, you know, actually this hasn't been such a horrible year for all of the just tsunami of new features. You know, a lot of it's pretty good. Windows is getting better all the time, so that's good. Hopefully you found this useful. I don't know where we. This, this will probably be pretty close to the end of the year, but, you know, there's always going to be more. There's so much more coming down the pike for sure. So we'll definitely have more next week and beyond. So thank you for watching. Thank you so much. If you're a Club Twit member, we love you. If you're not, please think about joining. You can find out more about Club TWiT at TWiTT TV Club TWiT. You can find out more, more about this podcast, Hands on Windows at Club. I'm sorry TV H O W. We'll have a new episode every Thursday and I'll see you next week. Thank you, Sam.