AI features are not all made equal. While some quietly make your life a little easier, others garner media attention for being revolutionary. Microsoft is adopting the second strategy.

The company is adding clever AI-powered features to the Windows 11 tools you already know, rather than introducing some gaudy new app or forcing you to learn a completely new tool. And the outcome? With virtually no work on your part, your daily workflow is about to undergo a significant upgrade.

Let’s examine the changes and their significance.

Your Screenshot Tool Is Now Smarter

Let’s start with the Snipping Tool. For many years, this application has been a mainstay of Windows. It allows you to record your screen, crop images, and possibly even draw on it. It’s easy, direct, and all of a sudden much more potent.

Snipping Tool will now support optical character recognition (OCR) thanks to Microsoft. This implies that text can now be copied straight from an image. You won’t have to retype anything, whether it’s a quote from a presentation, an error message, or a passage from a PDF. Simply pick the text in your screenshot, click “Copy,” and you’re done.

Time can be greatly saved with just this one modification. It’s not ostentatious, but once you use it, it’s one of those features that subtly becomes indispensable.

Real AI Boosts for Paint and Photos

Next up for some AI love is the Photos app. It is receiving updates that enable it to identify objects, faces, and animals in your photos. With a few clicks, you’ll be able to move people around, apply blurs, and isolate subjects from the background. This type of functionality was previously restricted to costly software. It’s now integrated into something you already own.

Then there is the one app that no one anticipated: Microsoft Paint.

That paint, indeed. The one you sketched on in computer class.

Paint will soon have a text-to-image generation tool added by Microsoft. Paint will then create an image of what you type, such as “a frog playing guitar under the moonlight.” DALL·E, the same generative AI model utilized in Bing’s image creator, is probably the basis for the technology underlying this.

Professional design software won’t be replaced by it. However, even if you have no artistic talent, it will enable you to quickly visualize entertaining concepts.

Local Processing Reduces Lag and Increases Privacy

Importantly, new hardware known as Neural Processing Units (NPUs) makes all these features function at their peak. These chips are made to perform AI functions right on your device. This implies that you can create images and recognize text without depending on cloud servers.

Newer PCs will be able to handle AI features locally thanks to AMD’s 7040 series and Intel’s upcoming Meteor Lake chips, which now include NPUs. The advantages? quicker results. More seclusion. and improved functionality even when you’re not online.

Therefore, no, Microsoft isn’t making a big deal out of these updates. Perhaps, though, that is its beauty. Your workflow remains unchanged, the apps remain familiar, and everything simply functions a bit better.