When most people think of AI, they’re normally in one of two camps. They either use AI religiously for everything, or they think most AI stuff is just clutter they could do without. Windows 11 has been famous for shoving AI features up users’ throats, and now, it’s getting even more embedded in your daily workflow.
Microsoft is now trying out embedding shortcuts to AI actions right within your operating system’s file explorer. As of the next major update to Windows 11, you might see a few actionable shortcuts for quick “AI actions” if you right-click a few image formats, letting you perform actions within Copilot or other AI services by Microsoft with a single click. The initial batch of these AI actions (these are only for Insiders right now, thankfully) is focused on images. When Windows detects you’ve right-clicked a .jpg, .jpeg, or .png file, it will suggest four possible AI actions.
One of these is Bing Visual Search, which will let you search the web using that image instead of a text query. There’s Blur Background, which integrates with the native Photos app and automatically identifies the background in a photograph to let you apply a blur effect with a click. The Photos app will also give you a shortcut for Erase Objects, which will help you clean up your photos by selecting or highlighting unwanted elements within an image. You can also remove backgrounds from images, though you will be redirected to Paint for that purpose.
Microsoft also plans to extend these quick AI actions to Microsoft 365 files in the subsequent weeks. It will be compatible for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files, and you will get, at least at first, access to two shortcuts. One of them is Summarize, which, as the name suggests, will give you a handy summary of the contents of the file with Copilot, and you’ll also get Create a FAQ, which will try to make a list of frequently asked questions based on the contents of the file.
For what it’s worth, I’m sure this will be useful for some people, especially for those who are deep in Microsoft’s app ecosystem and frequently use the company’s AI features. But for a lot of people, this will probably just be cluttering up a menu that has barely changed in decades. It doesn’t give you anything you can’t actually already do by going into apps like Photos, Paint, or Copilot, and you might click one of these accidentally at some point or other, since it’s additional buttons within the right-click menu you’re already used to looking at. Microsoft has been aggressively pushing Copilot for at least two years now, and it keeps getting even more obnoxious every time.
Thankfully, this is, for now, only available for Insiders, though Microsoft can, and probably will, roll it out to all Windows 11 users once 25H2 rolls around.
Source: Microsoft
