Hans-On Windows 137 transcript

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Coming up. Next on Hands-On Windows, we're going to take a look at some features that Microsoft announced is actively testing but has never delivered in stable for Windows 11. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands-On Windows. I'm Paul Thrott and this week we're going to take a slight diversion. We talk a lot about these new features that are coming to Windows 11 or are in Windows 11, and this week I'm going to talk about some that aren't in Windows 11. And what I mean by that is that since at least last September or so, microsoft has been testing various features for Windows 11, some of them co-pilot plus PC specific, some not actively in the Windows Insider program, but they've never come to the stable version of Windows 11, not yet.

I had gone through an enormous exercise of trying to figure out everything Microsoft's announced. Was it released and, if so, when and how did that happen? And the list of features that haven't been released yet is actually surprisingly long. So I thought I'd go through not the entire list, but some of the bigger ones. So I'm going to start with the co-pilot plus PC features. The most obvious is recall, which Microsoft announced last May and then released? No, it didn't. It was going to release it in June and preview, but then there was a big kerfuffle over that and eventually it was released for Snapdragon X based co-pilot plus PCs in preview in the dev channel of the Windows Insider program in November and I think later in November or in December it came to Intel and AMD based PCs. I don't have it installed in this computer, I don't really think we need to go over it again. You, I think you understand it, but Kind of a cool feature if you want this kind of a thing. Still not available. But tied to that is a related feature called click to do. When Microsoft first showed this off, it was a feature of Recall. It was only available in Recall, but now it's available everywhere. So I'm just running Microsoft Edge. This is an article that I wrote recently as I record this.

There's a couple of ways you can invoke this thing, and the big one is to hold down the Windows key and press the mouse button. You get that little AI effect. You can also do Windows key plus Q, which used to be a shortcut for search, but now it's just Windows key plus S. So when you do this, what you get is the ability to find things on the screen, and so, in this case, what we're seeing is a lot of text, obviously, and so the options that we're going to see up here oh, that's for recall, it's not going to work are going to be text related, right, and so I can type in a word. I could type it in correctly, perhaps, and it will highlight the instances of that word. That's pretty cool. And I can also right click and then I get these things called app actions, and these are specific to the type of content that we're looking at. So, in this case, what we're looking at is text, and so I can click summarize and it will summarize the text that you see there on screen. Now, this will be interesting because it's got some kind of accessory text over the side, but you can see how slowly this is moving. That's because this is happening on the MPU. This is a feature that requires a copilot plus PC, so this is a local feature. It's funny how it says summarizing.

An individual that would be me decided to enroll their Surface Laptop 7 in Windows 11's dev channel of the inside. Okay, you get the idea. So same thing with oh, let me just turn this off. Sorry. You could do the same thing with graphics. You'll get different options based on graphics, not a big deal. Since they started testing this, there have been a couple of additions to this, and one of them is this place and setting, so it's apps, actions, and then you get this list of apps that can recommend actions, right, and so over time, what we're going to see is more of this kind of thing, and so both of these happen to be image related, but you could, from that action menu that you see in click to do, do these things and it would actually load the app. It doesn't just happen as a service, but they're starting to integrate these things on the back end, and so that's actually pretty cool.

One of the other features we don't have yet this one kind of surprised me because I thought this was there, I'll just make this smaller is co-create. So if you look at this co-pilot menu in Paint, you'll see the four features that are generative AI related. Some are cloud-based, some are local. Co-creator is a local feature, so this is a co-pilot plus PC feature. Local co-creator is a local feature, so this is a co-pilot plus pc feature. Image creator, generative erase and remove background are all cloud-based ai, meaning that those features will work on any computer, but on this one, because they do have a co-pilot plus pc, I can click into this.

So there's a couple ways you can use this. You could have an image already loaded and, in fact, maybe that might be a not a horrible choice. Let I'll just do this one. I have to resize it because I already know that this is not or it's too big for Paint's generative AI features. Let me make sure it's. Oh, it's still a little too big. Let me do that again. I'll just make that like 80% as big. Okay, so now you got this image, image of the sky, whatever, so you could say you know, add a lot of colorful balloons. I could also, as I do this, draw in here, and so you could do a combination of things.

Now this has done this. I could add this to this image like so, and if I was smart I would have done this layer, but I didn't. But you get the idea. And then we have these other generative AI features. These are the ones that don't require a Copilot plus PC. But interesting idea. The quality of the images you get out of Co-Creator is not awesome. It's not as good as the best cloud-based AIs because it's running locally, but it's kind of a neat unique feature. I think it's only going to get better over time. Microsoft does update those models all the time, so potentially interesting, but something that we don't yet have Ditto for a bunch of the features in pain.

We've looked at some of this stuff in the past, obviously. In fact, maybe the better way to do this would be to just find an image. Let's see what we can do with this one. So just open this in the Photos app here. So this is an image of like an Xbox Backbone controller for a phone. Edit the features we see in here are going to vary by computer type. So you know, background blur, remove, replace any computer can do that, but these two here at the end require Copilot plus PCs. Neither one of these is available. That's interesting. I signed in earlier, but neither one of these is available yet and stable for some reason. So restyle image is where you take this image. You can add to it, like we did in co-creator, or you can just choose a style and it will do this local AI running off the MPU. Examine the image and then turn it into this fun impressionist painting of an Xbox background controller, which actually looks pretty cool, ditto for super resolution, right, which we demoed on an earlier show. So you get the idea there, but not available in stable Still months later, right?

Semantic Search. So this is the one that I know is coming soon, as of this recording. So in the patch Tuesday that we will have in April 2025, microsoft actually is going to add this feature. It's called Semantic Search. So if you've ever used search in Windows, you know how terrible it is. But if I went to search, it brings up the search box, which has search highlights. I start typing. I typed Windows, so you can see it down there. I type Windows. If you don't have the search box here, you'll have a search box up here.

I could go to documents and it will try to find documents that have the term Windows in them. But the way that semantic search works is it uses AI to examine the contents of documents and images to try to find those things, and so, theoretically, I could type something like I don't know for a fact that there are any images that have mountains in them or whatever, and say documents webs. I guess we'll call these documents. You know this doesn't work very well, right? So, even though I've had this on this computer for months, doesn't work great, but the one thing I have found is that it works a little bit better in File Explorer, because this is the other major place where this type of thing shows up. So I'm just going to go to where my photos actually are and I will type in mountain and see what it does, but in my experience, for the most part, it's just looking.

This is not semantic search, right? This is just file name search. So at some point this is going to work like AI search is supposed to work, by understanding the metadata behind these images, understanding the contents of these images and hopefully bringing them up in search. It's going to be shipping to stable any second now, so this should be happening. It can work with cloud files, which is OneDrive only, although that will be different in the future too. They're going to open it up to third parties, so if you use Dropbox or Google Drive or iCloud or whatever, you should be able to use it with that. It works with local files.

Actually, the one thing interesting there is understanding what is getting indexed here, right, and so if you go into settings, I have this set to classic, which I haven't changed on purpose because it should be fine. You can see it's actually. It's still. It's still not done. Maybe that's my problem, but it's it's. It's indexing the important parts of the file system. To me, I suppose I could add the OneDrive folder, but it should. It should already be working and it's not. So if you want to ensure this works, you could turn on enhance. This will index your entire computer. It's going to take a while. Like it says here, it should be plugged in. I'm not going to do that, obviously now, but something interesting to try.

Looking through the rest of this. Unfortunately, I suspect I can't demo too many of these and oddly and this is something we've talked about a bunch with Windows 11 these days, because of the way Microsoft rolls things out even though this computer has been around for a while, it doesn't actually have all of these features, even though I've used them on other PCs, or maybe other people have them on their PCs that are in the Insider program. When you go into where Paul accounts and then sign in options, depending on the computer, you're going to have two to three, or I should say one to three, windows Hello options. Right, everyone gets a pin. Everyone has to have a pin. In fact, if you sign in with a Microsoft account or a different online account, but depending on your computer, you might also have facial recognition and fingerprint recognition. This computer has facial but not fingerprint, so I've already enrolled in that and I can go in and change it et cetera, if I wanted to.

But they are modernizing the interface for this. This is not something I can easily show, but the basics here. If you want to run something like recall or there's some security feature, you'll get a Windows Hello pop-up. It's possible. We'll see one later in the show or in the next show and that interface is being updated. It's cleaner, it's simpler, it's faster than the interface you're probably seeing today on your computer, but it's not shipping and stable. So people just don't have that yet.

Open File Explorer there's a new home view here. I'm actually going to re-enable some options here, because I usually just turn all this stuff off for performance reasons. But this bit here I'm curious. I don't have anything here is new. So we've had recent, we've had favorites. In the future they're actually going to remove this and replace it with a new recommended section because you can still access your quick access folders over here, but new in the past few months. No, I'm sorry, it's not new in the past few months. It's not new yet. You don't have it yet, but Microsoft has been testing this. In fact, this one is the oldest one that I can find. This started testing in September of 2024. It's still not in stable, but with a Microsoft account, which is what I've signed in here, if anyone has shared files with you through OneDrive, you will see them here. No one has, so I don't have anything here and of course I'm just. I mean, I turned this off just for performance reasons, but they keep kind of messing around with this interface, I think just trying to make it more useful, so that's probably more useful. I guess Tied to that is something called OneDrive Resume and the idea.

There is a kind of a continuity-like feature. If you have an iPhone and a Mac or whatever, where, in this case, maybe you were looking at a document or an image or whatever it was in the OneDrive app on your phone, and when you go to your computer and sign in, you'll get a pop-up that says oh, you were doing this thing on your phone. Do you want to continue that? That's a good idea. I've never seen it. I haven't been able to test it. I've tried, so it will come on at some point, but they've been testing that one since February. It's not stable. Eventually we'll get there.

Then a couple of new sharing features. I feel like one of these I might have demoed, which is interesting because I'm not seeing it here on this particular computer. But if you right-click a pinned application in the taskbar like Word, where you can see these documents, this is called a jump list, right, and so these are documents I apparently accessed recently using Microsoft Word and actually you can see there's a bunch of OneNote stuff in here, and that's because Microsoft just made an announcement about OneNote and I was going back and looking at stuff I've written before. So the point of this is that you can click on one of these documents and go right to that. It just opens in the app. The thing you're not seeing here and the thing I have seen in the past but is not in this computer now for some reason is a share icon. So in addition to this pin icon, you'll get a share icon and if you click that, it will open the share pane and you can go from there to share it through, you know nearby sharing a compatible app, whatever it might be. So again, just kind of thinking through how people might use these features. Not a horrible idea.

And to end it with another terrific demo of nothing is another feature I'm not seeing on this computer, but they've been testing this one since March, which is sharing directly to apps from File Explorer. So today if you have an like I've selected this file and I could click share and it brings up the share pane, right, and then you get. You know, here's a list of apps that you can share with, some of which are installed, some of which I could install. I could go to nearby sharing and then see, you know, my phone and whatever other computers are available on my home network. But you can also right-click and do share. And this interface that you're seeing is the common interface. This is what everyone has today. It just says share and it does the same thing. Right, it brings up this menu. But what they're going to do, what they are doing, is adding a submenu to this. So instead of just share, it's going to have a list of the apps.

So if you look at Open With, this is an example of what it would look like is you could share directly to, not these apps, but the apps that are compatible with the file that I'm trying to share. So when we go into share, you can see I could share this to Notepad, which actually doesn't make any sense Paint Snipping Tool, copilot and then you can install these other apps right. So again, just trying to save some steps. The idea is, if you actually use share and I feel like sometimes I'm the only person who does that you can right-click on this share and then go right out to that app, because maybe that's a common workflow for you. When you share, you typically do it the same way every single time. Like I actually use nearby sharing all the time, and this used to be directly available, but now it's a submenu and it's kind of a little convoluted. So that will not be on that menu. That would be too simple, I guess. But for sharing with apps they're going to make that a lot easier than it is today.

So kind of a mixed bag here. I would say most of the major stuff is Copilot plus PC related, so it's not going to impact everyone. The only one of these that I mentioned, like I said, that I know is coming soon, is Semantic Search which you may see before you see this episode, depending on when you watch it. The other ones, your guess is as good as mine, so hopefully sometime soon we'll eventually get some of these new features for Windows 11, I'm sure sometime in 2025. So thank you so much for watching. We'll have a new episode of Hands-on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more at twittv. Thank you especially to our Club Twit members. If you're watching on YouTube, be sure to consider at least joining Club Twit. It's inexpensive, gets rid of the ads, lots of other perks, including, of course, ad-free access to all of Twit's other excellent podcasts. Please do consider that and I will see you next week.