Prepare to get angry in a whole new way by swapping accidentally opening the Windows Start menu with an accidental keystroke to summon an AI determined to paint a picture for you. Microsoft has announced plans to introduce a dedicated AI button to Windows PC keyboards, the first major change to their keyboards since the addition of the Windows key almost 30 years ago.
The new button is officially known as the Copilot key and is linked to the eponymous AI already integrated into Bing searches, Microsoft Office and Windows 11. (They have also separately incorporated the AI into a number of search tools). game development to generate dialogues, missions and characters on the fly, among other things, causing understandable distrust among developers.)
Pressing the button will bring up Copilot, which Microsoft says can be used to create images, generate songs, and organize writing, as well as more mundane tasks like adjusting your PC’s settings as requested. It’s essentially like a more advanced version of Microsoft’s previous virtual assistant, Cortana (remember that?), albeit committed to the even more dystopian and questionable nature of AI. I’m certainly not a fan of AI anyway, but I can’t really imagine asking my computer to generate a song for me while I work – or just take over the task of writing the email for me.
Microsoft’s blog, in fact, reads like the kind of dystopian speech masquerading as friendly corpospeak that you might hear from robots planning to replace the human race as efficiently as possible because they get excited about it. fact that the Copilot key “will allow people to participate”. more easily in AI transformation.”
“This will not only simplify users’ computing experience, but also amplify it, making 2024 the year of the AI PC,” they add, describing Copilot as “your everyday AI companion for work and life” – I suppose in the kind of voice used in commercials for those smart toys that eventually gain sentience and commit grisly murders in horror films.
Microsoft itself compares the addition of the Copilot key to the introduction of the Windows key all those years ago, stating: “We see this as another transformative moment in our journey with Windows where Copilot will be the point of entry into the world of AI on PC. “. An interesting comparison to a button that I’d bet most people only really think about these days when it accidentally locks them out of a game.
Like it or not, the Copilot key is apparently there. Microsoft says the button will start appearing on new Windows 11 PCs later this month and into spring, including on their own Surface machines.
