The Microsoft event held today in New York promised news for the company’s range of Surface computers, laptops and desktops. There have been – two new Surface models will soon hit the market – but the protagonist of the event has been someone else. For most of it, the company’s executives, from the president himself, Satya Nadella, to Yusuf Mehdi, the head of marketing, have preferred to talk about Copilot, the name that Microsoft has chosen for its artificial intelligence and which is now It will be practically impossible to escape.
Copilot will soon be present in the Windows taskbar, in the Office 365 tools, in the browser, Edge, in the Bing search engine. Because it is, it will even be in the operating system applications, such as Paint or the photo manager. When it arrives in the next Windows 11 update, which launches next week, it will even have its own keyboard shortcut. By pressing the Windows key on your computer and C you can start talking to this artificial intelligence, which is built on the same foundations as Chat GPT and can also create images thanks to the implementation of the recently announced DALL-E 3.
The company had already integrated artificial intelligence into many of its tools in recent months, but now it will have a cohesive platform that will move between its different products. “It will incorporate context and intelligence from the web, work data and what you are currently doing on the PC to provide better support,” Mehdi explained.
The idea of a virtual assistant for the PC is not new and in a way Microsoft has already tried to do it with Cortana, but with serious limitations. Now, relying on the latest advances in artificial intelligence, these types of conversational applications can be more useful, helping a user search for a file, organize the agenda, write a text or compose a presentation.
It can be used by voice or simply by writing what is needed in natural language and will have practically unlimited powers within the system, allowing, for example, to reorder the windows on the desktop or switch between the light and dark mode of the interface.
The new version of Windows will also include some new features not related to artificial intelligence, such as a new file explorer, native support for compressing and expanding RAR files.
Two new computers are the “ambassadors” of this new era of Windows, although, obviously, the new features will reach all PCs compatible with the latest versions of the system.
Microsoft took advantage of the event to launch the second version of the Surface Laptop Studio, a computer designed for creative users with a folding screen that transforms into a digital canvas. It uses 13th generation Intel processors and can be configured with Nvdia RTX 4050 or RTX 4060 graphics cards, quite powerful GPUs.
It is a device with a high price, which exceeds 2,000 euros in its entry-level version, but is focused on designers, video and photography editors or programmers who need power and the versatility of being able to draw directly on the screen thanks to the Surface Pen 2, a digital pen that has also been updated and magnetically attaches to your computer.
More affordable is the Surface Laptop Go 3, a more conventional laptop, with a 12.4-inch touch screen and equipped with 12th generation Intel processors, which represents a significant jump in power compared to the version that until now was available. sale. In the US the base model will start at $800. The company has not yet announced when the machines will be available in Spain or the price they will have.