NEW AI Update & IT Pro Features: A Closer Look at Windows 11 Moment 5

This Week in IT, Microsoft has announced new AI features coming to Windows, including in Copilot and built-in apps. There are several new Copilot plugins to connect with 3rd-party services, new skills, AI features in Photos and Clipchamp, intelligent Snap layouts, and expanded sharing options. There are also new Windows 365 features and updates for IT Pros.

Links and resources

• Microsoft Copilot improvements for Windows 11
• What’s new in Windows Autopatch: February 2024

Transcript

This Week in IT, Microsoft’s announced new AI features coming to Windows, including in Copilot and the built-in apps. There are several new Copilot plugins to connect with third-party services, new skills, AI features in Photos and Clipchamp, intelligent snap layouts, and expanded sharing options. There are also new Windows 365 features and updates for IT pros. So, stay tuned to find out more.

Welcome to This Week in IT, the show where I talk about everything connected to Windows, Microsoft 365 and Azure. But before I get started today, I’ve got a quick favor to ask you. About 66% of the people who watched last week’s video weren’t subscribed to the channel. Now as we go live today, we’re on about 3,530 subscribers and I’d really love it if this week we could push that up to about 3,600. So if you’d like to help us achieve our goal, then please subscribe to the channel and don’t forget to hit the bell notification to make sure that you don’t miss out on the latest uploads.

As we’ve discussed in previous weeks on this channel, we know that there’s a big update coming to Windows in fall of this year. Now there was some debate before and maybe still is about what it’s going to be called exactly, Windows 12 or will it still be Windows 11 and let us call it the 24H2 update. It seems like they’re heading down the 24H2 update and keeping the Windows 11 tag and I think that’s probably the best thing to do if there’s not going to be a major overhaul of the UI at this stage but I guess time will tell.

Now as part of that, they’re making improvements for ARM, of course the new Snapdragon chips that are going to be available later this year and there’s a whole load of stuff coming connected to AI to take advantage of all of that.(…) Now while we’re waiting for that, of course that’s kind of seven or eight months away for most people. There are some things coming into the current version of Windows 11 that everybody has access to on the stable channel to move us a little bit closer to some of those AI features.

Microsoft announced officially moment five for Windows 11 and we’ve talked about it on this channel before. This is going to be the last major update for Windows 11 before we really go into a whole new world of AI with the next big major update later this year.(…) Now this is all a little bit complicated as usual from Microsoft because we’re getting moment five I think in preview this month and they’re going to make that more generally available in March on patch Tuesday but there are other features that I’m talking about today that are coming as a continuous release effort if you like.

So, you can get those if you opt in for the early update experience but they’re not necessarily coming as part of moment five. They’re going to be drip fed to us over the coming months and they should all be generally available by April so some of you are going to see them sooner than others. What exactly is coming? So let’s start with Copilot and the built-in apps. Now Microsoft is adding some new third-party connectors to Windows Copilot including OpenTable, Shopify and Kayak.

Now personally I don’t use any of these services so I wonder how much value these are going to have for people. I would like you know it’s a great thing to see these new plugins coming. So for instance with OpenTable they’ve given an example that you could put in a prompt like create a healthy dinner party for eight people and then it will generate it for you.(…) Now these plugins I would like to see some more kind of enterprise focused productivity plugins coming to Windows Copilot.

Of course Microsoft 365 Copilot as well but I guess with this we’re heading in the right direction. I’ll give you one example so instead of Open Table for dealing with menus and restaurants and things I would like to see Air Table but that’s maybe just because I’m a bit of a geek. There are some new skills coming to Windows Copilot so if you’re not aware Windows Copilot can do things like change your operating system configuration so you could ask it you know let’s change the dark mode for instance and it will just go and do that for you without you having to find the setting and the configuration to change that manually.

So there are a whole load of new skills coming in. I’ll reel off just a few of them so you get the general idea. So you’ll now be able to turn on or off the battery saver mode. You can launch voice input if that’s your thing and you can show what available wi-fi networks there are. The photos app is also getting another update. If you’re used to an iPhone or Android phone of course then you’ll be familiar probably with the feature that allows you to intelligently select an item so you can just press on it and it kind of understands the item so it might be a person against a background for instance and then you can choose to delete that object.(…) So that feature is coming to the photos app.

Of course they’re trying to make these experiences more mobile like and there’s a lot of AI stuff have come into those mobile photo editing apps in the last year or so. Clipchamp is also getting a silence remover feature so you don’t have to go and manually cut out those long gaps or even short gaps. It will go through and automatically do that for you. Again that’s a common feature that’s coming into many video editors. So what about Windows itself? Microsoft is saying that we’re getting an intelligent snap layout feature. So snap is that feature where you hover over the maximize button it will give you various different window layouts that you can choose from.

Now I haven’t seen this in action but I think insiders may have had access to this on and off over the last few months. You can let me know in the comments if I’m wrong about that below. But we’re now getting some intelligent layouts based on your actual app usage. Now this is something more in line with what we’re going to move towards in the next major update for Windows that’s coming later in the year but I’m excited to see how this stuff is going to work because I’ve talked about on this channel in the past things like virtual desktops and snap layouts and tab groups are all very well but I have to make lots of decisions about how I use those things.

Now if Windows can say well you need to group these tabs together you need to arrange your windows like this and just give me the option to say well okay yes or no then I think that’s a step forwards with making these things much more usable for people in a way that they would actually adopt them and use them on a more regular basis. So I’m excited to see how that’s going to work.

Snap layouts also gets another minor change. The wording for this was really odd in the blog post but as far as I can understand snap layouts are now going to be accessible from not only the maximized button on an application but you’ll also be able to access those snap layouts if you hover over the minimize button. So there you go. Now I don’t use the built-in sharing in Windows very much. I’m not even sure how that works unless you kind of have the app installed on Windows.

I guess you have to and be logged into it but Microsoft is expanding the sharing option to work with more third-party services so now they’re bringing Snapchat and Instagram so you’ll be able to share content to those applications too but as I said I’m not sure how many people really use those apps on a PC but well if you do starting with this update you’ll be able to share to them. Microsoft also highlighted some changes to accessibility and one thing that I noted was custom voice commands so rather than I’ve never really used this I’ve dabbled with it a bit in the past but rather than having to say you know a long sentence or something to get it to do something you can create your own custom words that you know correspond with a particular action in Windows.

I don’t know like for instance open this particular application you can just create a one-word custom shortcut if you like so it’s a bit it’s a bit like keyboard shortcuts but with voice. A couple of things coming for Windows 365 users. Apparently cloud PCs are now getting support for password-less logins and there’s a fast account switching experience coming so Microsoft is saying it’s going to be easier to disconnect from your cloud PC and see desktop indicators to help you easily see whether you are on your cloud PC or your local PC so I guess that was a bit confusing in the past. So there are a few new features coming to Windows Auto Patch this month a couple of them in preview and one already available.

So, the first one is the ability to import update rings for Windows 10 and later but probably more interesting is the customer defined service outcomes. So what that means is that Microsoft is essentially with this change tying the success of a deployment based on the rings that you’ve actually defined. Before deployment success was measured essentially on a static schedule of 21 days but now Windows Auto Patch aims to keep at least 95% of eligible devices on the latest Windows quality updates 21 days after release.

We’re also getting improved data refresh speed and accuracy and Microsoft has made a really big change here so instead of having to wait 24 hours for updated information the cadence of that update is now being brought down to just 30 minutes. I’ve always found that rather frustrating about Microsoft products sometimes how long you have to wait for information to refresh. I guess that’s just how the backend hangs together but this is a really big improvement. So as far as moment updates go this is a relatively small one.

Not all of the things that I’ve mentioned today are necessarily coming as part of that moment but are coming over the next couple of months and will be rolled out gradually and of course these are quality of life things. Personally I’m not too interested in the third party kenexyn co-pilot at the moment. Not interesting for me. The new skills are well okay might be useful but probably not for me personally.

What I’m really interested in actually are the things that they’re doing with snap is my overall productivity with Windows. How can Windows help to optimize my workflow, orchestrate things like tabs, windows without me with virtual desktops, without me having to think about it too much and make a whole load of decisions. Because if I’m going to have to make a whole load of decisions I’m probably just not going to use these things to be honest.

So, how AI can help with that and we’re just starting to see the fruits of Microsoft’s work here. Just starting to appear with this update but as I said the real juicy stuff not coming until the big update in the fall. If you found this video useful I’d really appreciate it if you gave it a thumbs up because that helps to get the video seen by more people on YouTube and to grow the channel of course. I’m going to leave you with another video on the screen that you might find useful now about Microsoft bringing Microsoft 365 apps to Zoom, integrating them with Zoom and that will be coming to Zoom users very soon. So check that out if you are on that platform.

But that’s it from me for this week and thanks for watching. I’ll see you next time.