As AI continues to play an increasingly important role in various industries, it only seems to be common sense to integrate AI into products and services. Microsoft has already showcased its commitment to AI with the implementation of AI features in its web browser, Microsoft Edge. Looking at how great it has been with Microsoft Edge, Microsoft is now ready to bring up AI into the Windows 11 operating system. While Windows 11 is great, it’s set to become even better.
During the annual developer community event, Microsoft Build, the tech titan has decided to bring the goodness of AI to everything including the Windows operating system. Windows 11 will soon be getting a ton of new AI-based elements. We will be talking about them below so, keep reading on.
Windows 11 and AI – What’s New Coming to the PC OS?
There are going to be a ton of cool new features and AI elements that you will be seeing soon within Windows 11. There are new things such as AI tools for Windows 11 developers, a new Bing sidebar on your desktop, as well as AI integration inside the Microsoft Store.
Let’s dive a bit deeper to know more details about the new Windows 11 features.
Copilot for Windows 11
So, you might be wondering what this is all about. Well, we did talk about how AI is going to be integrated into the operating system. Now, Windows 11 users will be able to easily make use of Bing Chat and Bing AI right from the desktop itself. This means you no longer need to make use of Microsoft Edge or any other web browser to get certain tasks done with the help of AI. Apart from just the smart AI Bing Bar, you will also get access to quick shortcuts for Snap Assist, Snipping Tool, and copy-paste options.
The best thing about Windows Copilot is that you can easily install third-party plugins to it such as from Bing and ChatGPT. The Windows Copilot feature is slated for a release anytime soon in June.
New AI Developer Tools for Windows 11
With everything taking the AI path, it’s not hard to see that companies are preparing to create tools for developers that have AI tech. This helps the developer to easily create and develop apps for the platform with ease. There is now a brand new Windows AI library that has been trained to make use of the newer learning models and also APIs. The release dates for these tools will be revealed soon so that developers can test and preview these tools to see if they work great for them or not.
In order to get AI working the best with Windows 11, Microsoft has partnered with a number of brands that can help optimize various new AI tools for Windows 11 like Stable Diffusion, and Nvidia’s NEMo. Here is a list of brands that Windows has partnered with for optimizing AI tools.
- Acer
- Asus
- AMD
- Dell
- HP
- Lenovo
- Nvidia
- Samsung
Dev Home For Windows 11
As a developer, you would always want to have a streamlined workflow so that it becomes easy to get back on what you left off. This is a brand-new dashboard for developers that can help you easily track all your workflows, have better filesystem performance, and make it easier to install packages and connect to GitHub. The brand new Dev Home app is now available as a preview via the Microsoft Store. You can head here to download the Dev Home Preview app.
AI with Inline Command Programs
You can now complete a number of tasks with Windows Copilot whether you are running your command lines inside Windows Terminal and WinDBG. Thanks to Windows Copilot, you will now be able to automate and complete your tasks faster without having to worry too much about things. Here is a list of some of the improvements that have been made to Windows 11 for the developers
- You can now quickly identify and access any instance of each app housed in the taskbar with just one click. All instances of the app are ungrouped with labels on the taskbar.
- You can now hide your Time and Date with a setting on the taskbar. With this setting, users will be able to hide the time to remain focused and capture screen recordings without having to edit to hide the time and date. The feature is located on the time and date settings page in Windows Settings.
- Quickly and easily shut down applications with a simple right-click on the app directly from the taskbar without opening the Task Manager
- We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz, and many others using the lib archive open-source project. You now can get the improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows.
- We are adding tab tear-out to Windows Terminal so that you can easily organize your different shells into windows according to your needs.
Windows Development for ARM-Based Systems
Microsoft is quickly bringing in ARM support for a number of programs, middleware thyroid party apps as wella s open source apps to be supported on the ARM platform. Here’s what’s new for ARM-based systems.
- Visual Studio 17.6 now ships with MAUI support for Arm
- Visual Studio 17.71 Preview 1 now ships with support for Linux development with C++.
- LLVM v12.0 and onwards for cross-compile and native compile options for Arm.
- Node 20.0.0 is available from April with native Arm support.
- WiX installer v4.0 is available to create native installers for Arm.
- New middleware projects that have been released in the last 12 months: Qt 6.2, CMake 3.24, Bazel, 5.1, OpenSSL 3.0, OpenBLAS, 0.3.21, Python 3.11.
- Unity Player is now generally available for Windows on Arm natively. Developers using the game engine will be able to easily target Windows on Arm devices to get native performance on current and future titles.
- Additional solutions are coming soon to Arm64 For example GNU GCC, Flutter & Dart, PyTorch, and GIMP.
Apart from the new features and support for ARM-based devices, there are also a number of programs and apps that now support ARM-based devices. Here’s the list.
- Absolute Secure Endpoint Security
- Adobe Fresco
- BitDefender Endpoint Security
- Brave Browser
- JAWS
- LibreOffice
- Luminar Neo
- McAfee Total Protection
- Prime Video
- Sketchable Plus
- Symantec Endpoint Security
- TopHatch Concepts
- VMware Carbon Black
- Zoom
Other programs that are planned to be made available for ARM-based devices are as follows.
- Cisco WebEx
- Dropbox
- Plex
- Reincubulate Camo
- Unity
Improvements and Features To The Microsoft Store
The Microsoft Store has seen even more usage thanks to Windows 11. Now, Microsoft is planning to bring AI-powered features to the app store to make it an even better experience for the end user. Here’s what’s new for Microsoft Store.
- Microsoft Store AI Hub: Coming soon, we are introducing a dedicated section in the Microsoft Store on Windows that will curate the best AI experiences built by the developer community and Microsoft.
- Microsoft Store AI-Generated keywords: To help optimize app discovery, we are introducing a new tool in Partner Center that leverages AI to generate and suggest search tags for apps to improve discoverability.
- AI-Generated review summary: We are making it faster and easier for customers to scan reviews for apps by using the power of AI to compile thousands of reviews into a simple summary, enabling customers to discover new content with ease.
- Microsoft Store Ads: Beginning in June, Microsoft Store Ads will expand its footprint beyond the U.S., to more than 150 regions worldwide. You will also have more options to reach customers with a new premium, high-traffic spotlight placement in the Store and Bing.com search results.
- Backup and Restore Apps: To help you retain your customers when they switch devices, we are enhancing the backup and restore experience for apps. This update is in preview and is available to Windows Insiders today.
This concludes everything you need to know about how Microsoft is quickly bringing AI integration into the operating system and ensuring that the end user and developer have a problem-free experience with the operating system. A lot of these cool features will soon be available to all users in the coming days or at least in the coming months.
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