Quick Glance of Windows Copilot! Will It Truly Change the Way We Work with Computer?

Natural Language Processing AI models are ushering in unprecedented ways of working. At Microsoft Build 2023 conference on Tuesday, Microsoft announces Windows Copilot, a centralized “AI copilot” for its rather popular operating system, Windows 11.

On this page, I’ll quickly walk you through some of the key features of Windows Copilot, and we’ll then focus on Windows Copilot’s new PDF summarizing feature, and provide insights on its performance from the perspective of a PDF expert.

Windows Copilot in a Nutshell

Windows Copilot is a newly released feature for Windows 11 computers, that integrates across and shows up on the sidebar of your Windows 11 operating system.

According to the official statements from Panos Panay, Microsoft’s head of Windows and devices, “Windows Copilot stays consistent across your running programs and it acts as your personal assistant.”

It will be natively integrated into the Windows 11 operating system, as well as the Edge browser when it’s released. It understands and processes natural language requests, and responds with interactable answers.

Utilizing OpenAI’s open plugin standard, the interoperability between ChatGPT and Windows Copilot is ensured.

Opinions toward Windows Copilot are not all positive. “Windows Copilot isn’t even anywhere near Cortana”, some said, and bittersweet (even salty) comments are all over the place.

That said, there’s an undeniable fact that the possibility is endless with the integration of AI.

Comment
by u/theverifiedthug from discussion Microsoft announces Windows Copilot
in Windows11

Comment
by u/TechieNooba from discussion Microsoft announces Windows Copilot
in Windows11

Windows Copilot Features, Takeaways

In the official announcement video on YouTube, Microsoft showcased the following key features of their new Windows Copilot.

Personalize and Navigate Your PC

Sending a message “How to can I adjust my system to get work done?” to Copilot, for example, Copilot will shortly provide several actionable suggestions to set the mood for your system that helps you focus, along with the clickable buttons to turn on Focus Session or the Dark Theme instantly.

Working with Apps

Looking for music to listen to while working? Just as Copilot and it will recommend and play tracks from your music apps like Spotify.

Playing a song from music apps is just an example, it also pulls data and information from your other programs like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and more.

Expanded Features with Plugins

You get to extend your Windows Copilot’s capabilities through the integration and cooperation with plugins like Thomson Reuters, Atlassian’s Jira, and Adobe Express.

Summarize PDFs

According to the Microsoft Developer’s demonstration in the Windows Copilot announcing video, you can intuitively drag and drop a PDF file from File Explorer to the Copilot, and three options are provided:

• Explain: Copilot will explain the complicated context in the imported PDFs in bite-sized and digestible sentences
• Rewrite: Using extensively trained large language models, Copilot rewrites PDF sentences in more readable lines
• Summarize: Copilot summarizes lengthy PDF documents into paragraphs with key points

For users who haven’t tried AI-based PDF workflows, what Copilot delivers seems refreshing.

How AI Works with PDFs Today

For me who works with PDF essays and manuals considerably, on the other hand, what Copilot has to offer when dealing with PDFs is barely satisfactory, given the ubiquity of AI PDF summarizers. Allow me to explain.

A question comes naturally, is Windows Copilot better than Microsoft 365 Copilot in document processing? Hard to tell, their processing of professional documents after all, with the help of AI assistance, isn’t exactly the way it was anticipated.

As a matter of fact, PDF AI summarizer tools and PDF chatbots are not new things. The techy world already witnessed the birth of a plethora of related tools, such as LangChain, Humata, ChatPDF, and ChatDoc.

How Copilot works is basically sending text-based information to ChatGPT and giving it specific instructions, mentioned above, using text prompts, but ChatGPT can do a lot more than explain, summarize, and rewrite.

Take another ChatGPT-integrated business tool PDFgear Chatbot for comparison, PDFgear allows you to do a lot more other than condensing PDF documents or summarizing PDF articles.

• Three suggested questions are provided which are extremely friendly to non-techy users
• For summarization and answers to your questions, PDFgear shows citations for you to quickly jump to the source of the information
• The support for lengthy PDF documents such as essays, textbooks, and legal papers
• Merge PDF documents to summarize multiple PDF documents in one go
• Inbuilt PDF annotation and editing features which are practical for remote collaborations

PDFgear Chatbot, a professional PDF document processing expert, unlocks various usage scenarios of documents through natural language dialogue, covering PDF summarizing, extracting, editing, and sharing. If Microsoft eventually manages to put these useful features into Copilot, it would then be a game changer.

Could be Better

The advent of Windows Copilot does offer a brand new way for people to interact with their operating systems. It could be a revolutionary update that entirely changes the way the computing world runs.

But Windows Copilot only provides basic PDF summarizing and analyzing features that have already been covered by GPT-based PDF chatbots.

It serves as a good supplement if you’re not so demanding about working with PDF, considering it will be eventually on Windows 11, otherwise, you need a pro-level PDF chatbot instead.