After Microsoft introduced its new Copilot assistant to millions of Windows 11 and Windows 10 users last fall, the company just announced a major change to make Copilot even more integrated into Windows 11 PCs: a dedicated Copilot key .
This new Copilot key will appear on the keyboards of new Windows 11 PCs that begin shipping later this month, with new models to be announced before CES 2024. The company also mentioned that new Surface devices coming this year will be delivered with this new Copilot. key.
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“The introduction of the Copilot key marks the first significant change to the Windows PC keyboard in nearly three decades. We believe this will make it easier for people to participate in the AI transformation,” explained Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and director of consumer marketing at Microsoft.
The executive highlighted that the introduction of this dedicated Copilot key is the biggest change to the PC keyboard since the Windows key was added almost 30 years ago. “We see this as another transformative moment in our journey with Windows where Copilot will be the entry point into the world of AI on PC,” Mehdi said.
In practice, pressing the Copilot key will open the AI Assistant on the desktop, just like clicking the Copilot shortcut in the Windows taskbar. However, on PCs where Copilot is not available or disabled, pressing the Copilot key will simply launch Windows Search.
Microsoft designed Copilot as an “everyday AI companion” that can help Windows users be more productive. Copilot offers free access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 and DALL·E 3 models, and Microsoft 365 commercial customers can also pay for the Copilot experience for Microsoft 365 which integrates the AI assistant with Office apps, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Whiteboard and Microsoft Loop. .
Thanks to new AI experiments like Copilot and recent chips from Intel and AMD that include dedicated AI coprocessors, Microsoft believes 2024 will be the year of the AI PC. “We will continue to develop Windows to be the destination for the best AI experiences. This will require an operating system that blurs the lines between local processing and the cloud,” Mehdi said today.
Although Copilot is currently available on Windows 11 and Windows 10, the next version of Windows coming out later this year, which may or may not be called “Windows 12,” is expected to be entirely AI-focused. According to a recent report, one of the biggest changes in this update could be a more integrated Copilot assistant that can run in the background to help users throughout the day.
