Microsoft has just announced a major update to Windows 11. As expected, the main new feature will be an overhaul of the Start menu. But there’s also a healthy dose of new features linked to Copilot+ , notably to make it easier to search your machine’s storage or improve your images and photos in Photos and Paint.
Windows 11: The Start menu has changed dramatically.
It’s a bit of a step backwards (to Windows 10, in fact), but the main idea behind the changes to the Start menu is to display all the installed applications when you open it. Don’t panic, this will be presented in a drop-down format, and above all you’ll finally be able to sort them by category.
The other new feature (not linked to AI) is the integration of your smartphone with Windows. This means you can access your contacts, messages and calls directly from your iPhone or Android connected to your PC screen.
The “Copilot+” dose of AI for PCs
Microsoft is going to take care of the functionalities for PCs ‘helped’ by an NPU (and therefore Copilot+ certified). This is where we’ll find a host of new features. An AI agent in Settings will help you configure your system more easily without having to go through a lot of steps. The ‘Click to do’ functions will allow you to act quickly on text or images. It’s in the ‘creative’ tools that the changes will be most visible, with Photos featuring a function for automating brightness improvements. Paint, for its part, will feature tools for rapid capture, enabling you to move elements around intelligently. Finally, the handy screen capture tool also benefits from AI, with a ‘Perfect Capture’ function that automatically crops important content. You can also extract text directly from your captures and integrate it into other …Microsoft tools
For the moment, we don’t know when this update will arrive. However, when it comes to AI tools, Microsoft is continuing with its rather questionable strategy of offering them as a priority to Insiders with a PC equipped with a Snapdragon X Copilot Plus…
