Microsoft Copilot could take away this Windows 11 feature as the tech giant desperately pushes AI

[Windows Central]

A new behavior in Windows 11 replaces the option to open notifications with a swipe with opening Copilot. The change entered testing late last year and has proven controversial.

Microsoft Copilot could take away this Windows 11 feature as the tech giant desperately pushes AI : Read more

 

[GraniteStateColin]

As an information tool, I think Co-Pilot is awesome. It's VASTLY BETTER than any search engine. You can ask a question and get an answer to the question, not a bunch of links to pages that may or may not answer it. That's pure awesome and absolutely game changing for information searching on the Internet.

However, gestures should be intuitive for quick actions (i.e., a swipe yields instant results), where the gesture relates to the related action and should not then require further action to make the gesture have been relevant. The notifications have always appeared in the lower right of the screen (long before there was a formal notification panel), so swiping from the right to get at them makes some intuitive sense. I don't see the connection to Co-Pilot where even after swiping from the right, you then need to either type or press the microphone icon and talk to the PC, which then pauses to formulate a response. If it takes several seconds to complete the activity, then you don't need to waste one of 4 possible edge swipe gestures to perform it.

Just make the existing Search box Co-Pilot controlled. This would simplify the UI (1 search/info box instead of 2), leverage existing user behavior (which would increase usage by steering all Windows-based searches through it), and use the existing Start button as a way to get there (currently hitting Start also lets you start typing in the Search box).

Oh, and the existing Search box ALREADY DOES THIS, along with providing file or application results on the PC if the search criteria would match with a document or app. I don't understand at all what the benefit would even be to adding a separate Co-Pilot panel when we already have this through Start/Search.

 

[naddy69]

"Microsoft is getting desperate with its push to use Copilot."

Getting desperate? They have BEEN desperate for the last year, pushing this stuff. Fortunately it is easy to disable all of it.

 

[Sean Endicott]

"Microsoft is getting desperate with its push to use Copilot."

Getting desperate? They have BEEN desperate for the last year, pushing this stuff. Fortunately it is easy to disable all of it.

That's fair. I suppose I could have said that Microsoft now comes off as even more desperate than before.

 

[The Werewolf]

For me, genLLM is great for tidying up text and cleaning up grammatical errors, or for generating template material that has no specific style, but as a source of truth (ie: "What were the Paris accords about?"), it is VERY dangerous to use because it has no real intelligence - rather it's just aggregating existing information and cannot discriminate between probably factual and probably fictional.

I worked on systems like this in 1990s (yes, it's really not a new thing, sorry) and yeah, we were surprised at how well it could synthesise natural output, but also that it was equally good at generating contextually meaningful output as it was at generating utter gibberish.

In the end, I've found that it just gets in the way and can lull you into a false sense of security exactly because what it generates can feel so natural and correct.

Basically, we created the world's best con artists.

Like others here, I have no problem with it being on my system - but I have a big problem with it being forced on me against my will with no way to switch it off.

Case in point, as I type this, Edge is constantly predicting what I'm going to type next and show it on the screen. 90% of the time, it's wrong and I've learned to ignore it. But sometimes it interferes with the text edit box on some websites (Twitter being a notable case) and it makes chunks of what I've typed vanish - endings of words most often, but sometimes it just goes nuts and starts type backwards or just types gibberish.

And I can't turn it off.