With Windows 11’s most recent AI features, Microsoft isn’t creating anything new. It’s not putting a talking assistant on every available space on your screen or creating some futuristic interface that you’ll have to learn.

What it’s doing is much more useful: Subtly improving commonplace apps.

Subtle AI-driven improvements are being made to the Snipping Tool, Photos, Paint, and even the Camera app. What’s the best part? You won’t have to alter how you use them. They will simply begin to do more.

Smart Recognition and OCR Integrated into Commonplace Tools

First, let’s talk about the Snipping Tool, that ubiquitous screenshot tool. It is currently being enhanced by Microsoft with optical character recognition (OCR). This implies that you can copy the text directly from the image when you take a screenshot of a webpage, document, or anything else that contains text.

That random code snippet you saved during a Zoom call? It can now be pasted into your IDE. The passage from a PDF? Simply copy it. Eliminate the need to type text from screenshots.

Using the tool is unaffected by this feature. However, it significantly enhances your capabilities.

Additionally, the Photos app is becoming more intelligent. Microsoft is introducing AI capabilities that will enable the app to identify objects and people in your photos. With a few clicks, you’ll be able to eliminate unwanted elements, isolate subjects, and blur backgrounds.

In the past, Photoshop was required for these kinds of edits. They are now integrated into Windows.

Paint Can Now Construct Pictures From Words

AI is even reimagining the humble drawing tool, Microsoft Paint. Microsoft is experimenting with text-to-image capabilities, which allow you to type a sentence and have it become a picture.

Do you want to witness a “sunset over a mountain lake with flying birds”? That can be produced by paint. Similar to Bing’s Image Creator, the underlying technology is probably an OpenAI model based on DALL·E.

For a tool that was formerly thought to be little more than a sketchpad, it’s a significant step. Even those who have never used a design tool before can now create visual content with Paint thanks to this update.

Again, there’s no need to install any new apps. no learning curve. Just more authority in a familiar setting.

Thanks to new hardware, everything operates locally.

How, then, does everything function so smoothly?

The hardware holds the solution. Neural Processing Units (NPUs) in particular. Compared to conventional processors, these AI-focused chips perform machine learning tasks much more effectively.

Thanks to new processors like AMD’s Ryzen 7040 series and Intel’s Meteor Lake, they are beginning to appear in more consumer PCs. Your computer can run AI functions locally with NPUs built in, which makes them faster, requires no internet, and protects your privacy.

Additionally, this lessens the need for cloud servers to handle the labor-intensive tasks. Without any delay or data upload, your AI-enhanced tools function immediately.

Microsoft’s actions here are not only technically remarkable but also well-considered. You are not hindered by these upgrades. They don’t ask you to change. They simply make your work a bit more efficient.

Perhaps the best kind of AI is the one that doesn’t require any thought.