Microsoft has released a new Windows 11 insider preview build to the beta channel. As always, the company has pushed two new preview builds to the insiders, with these version numbers – 22621.1037 and Build 22623.1037 (KB5021304). These are the last preview builds of this year, the rollout will go back to normal next month.
After releasing the year’s last preview build to the dev channel yesterday, Microsoft has pushed the incremental builds to the beta channel. The newer beta build is labeled with the 10.0.22623.1037 (KB5021304) firmware version, this is a small incremental that you can quickly install on your PC.
The update is rolling with a bunch of new features, although, the new features are available on the 22623.1037 build number and turned off on the 22621.1037 build. Moving to the changes, then the new build brings Voice Access improvements, the feature gets support for UI controls, new commands, and better response. The UI controls for voice access have different names such as:
- Names which contain numbers in them, for example the Calculator app where you can now directly say “Click 5”.
- Names without any whitespaces between them, for example in Excel, under the Insert tab, you can interact with UI controls like “PivotTable” and “PivotChart” directly by saying “click pivot table” or “click pivot chart”.
- Names with special characters in them, for example items like “Bluetooth & devices” or “Dial – up”. You can now say “click Bluetooth and devices” or “click dial hyphen up” and interact with these UI controls.
You can explore more details about the new Voice Access improvements on Windows Insider Blog.
Apart from that the upgrade brings new Taskbar Search appearances to the beta channel and updated the Quick Settings icons in the taskbar for focus mode.
The new builds addresses a couple of issues including the Taskbar response issues when using search box, unexpected colors in UI elements might have affected Task Manager, a few explorer.exe crash issues, and also addresses the Data Protection Application Programming Interface (DPAPI) decryption issue.
Here’s the complete list of fixes on Windows 11 insider preview build 22623.1037.
- Taskbar & System Tray
- Updated the Quick Settings icons in the taskbar when using a screen reader so if you set focus to each of the icons it no longer includes the words system state and instead just says what the icon is (for example instead of “system volume state” it just says “volume”).
- Fixed a few more explorer.exe crashes relating to recent taskbar changes.
- Taskbar
- We fixed the issue causing Task Manager to become unresponsive when using the search box at the top of Task Manager.
Fixes available on both Windows 11 insider preview build 22621.1037 and 22623.1037:
- We fixed a known issue that might have affected Task Manager. It might have displayed certain elements in the user interface (UI) in unexpected colors. Some parts of the UI might not have been readable. This issue might have occurred if you had “Choose your mode” set to “Custom” in the Personalization > Colors section of Settings.
- We fixed an issue that might have affected Data Protection Application Programming Interface (DPAPI) decryption. The decryption of a certificate private key might have failed. Because of that, virtual private network (VPN) and other 802.1 certificate-based authentication might have failed. This issue might have occurred when you encrypted the DPAPI master key with a wrong value.
If you’ve joined the beta channel on Insider Preview Program and running on Windows 11, then you’ll receive the beta preview build. You can simply head over to Settings > Windows Update > click on Check for Updates. And from there you can simply install the update on your PC.
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