I don't use a Windows Copilot+ PC as my daily driver, although I have a few in my office. But there is one very important feature of Copilot+ that makes me want to replace my current laptop, dock my Copilot+ computer, and boot it up.
Very few people bought a Copilot+ computer. last year. So these features that are currently tied to Copilot+ PCs and their NPUs are little known: Windows Recall; Paint's Cocreator, Generative Erase, Object Selection and Sticker Generator; Click to do; Super photo resolution, re-lighting and changing image style; smart search functions in the Settings menu; Windows Studio Effects; and live subtitles.
My editor suggested that I'd prefer the latter feature, Live Subtitles, perhaps because it's both useful and cool. But no! Instead, I have one Copilot+ feature that I use often: Image Resizer, which is now called Super Resolution.
What are these Copilot+ features?
Our explainer on What is a Copilot+ computer? the focus was on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor and the laptops that can use it. Select Intel Core Ultra (Lunar Lake) and AMD Ryzen AI 300 laptops are now also eligible. They all depend on strength NPI, Engine at the heart of these chips.
Microsoft, in turn, uses the NPU to implement some of its artificial intelligence functions, which appeared on Windows PCs with the NPU installed. Here is a short list of those features that I explained above and you can use the link for a deeper dive. Please note that these are the functions that demand NPU, and you won't get them unless you have a Copilot+ PC.
- Windows recall: A handy but controversial Microsoft tool that takes snapshots of your computer to help you find misplaced pieces of information.
- Co-author of Paint: An art tool that creates images in near real time as you sketch, preserving the layout of your drawing.
- Click to do: Think of it as a smart right-click menu that uses artificial intelligence to guess what you want to do.
- Windows Photos style change image: If you want to turn a photo into a mosaic or Monet painting, you can ask the Photo AI to do it for you.
- Windows Studio Effects: A collection of tools to blur backgrounds, filter noise, and create a mindful effect.
- Live subtitles: It provides AI-powered subtitling and translation of pre-recorded and streamed videos.
- Photo' Image Relight: A subtle editing tool that provides additional lighting effects.
- Microsoft is also testing semantic searchboth for files and for the Settings menu. The latter is now alive.
Why do I love super resolution?
For every story we write, we need art to accompany it. If you're reviewing a laptop, your work is practically done for you. We need an illustration that meets certain image size guidelines, and sometimes that means working with a very small icon—like the Microsoft Store taskbar icon or the Copilot icon. Sometimes you can't find an image large enough.
If you decide to edit a photo in the Windows Photos app, you can turn on Super Resolution. Here you can scale the photo to a higher resolution, and Windows does some AI editing effects to try to smooth out the grain. Here I took the tiny OneDrive icon on the Windows taskbar and increased the resolution. The slider shows the differences.
Mark Hachman / Foundry
Super Resolution is the perfect tool for the job. I can take a small image and just enlarge it in Paint, but the tiny icon can look blurry and fuzzy when enlarged. The image resize tool works very well for enlarging And sharpening the image so it looks pretty good. And, of course, it's free.
Certainly, You you can use super resolution for something like a scanned photo or something. It's not a tool you'll have to dig out often, but it helps me a lot when I need it. It's not a miracle worker, there are paid services like Topaz.ai that promise to do a better job. But again, Super Resolution is free, convenient, and right on my laptop.
Why don't I use live subtitles? Basically, I don't watch that many videos. I will watch foreign TV (my wife is a fan of Netflix dramas) and read foreign reports. I don't often watch foreign TikToks or other videos, and many of these platforms already have translation built-in anyway. I'm also never sure that Live Captions is giving me the correct translation.
Live subtitles are still pretty magical – it's easy to take them for granted, but this is something out of the ordinary. Star Trek come to life. But in my day-to-day work, it's the little things that matter, and Image Resizer fits the bill.
Bonus feature for you: Generative erasing.
One of the problems with Microsoft's latest AI project is that some functions require an NPU and others don't – and there have been no reports on this. It's chaotic. I really like how Microsoft has quietly taken some of the best features of apps like Photoshop and brought them to Windows, like layers in the Paint app.
Microsoft
For years, Photos also had a tool called Spot Fix, a very early use of artificial intelligence for photo editing. I don't like to edit photos too much just because we often have a journalistic responsibility to show things as they are. If there are fingerprints on your laptop, it can sometimes be helpful to show it. In some cases, I used the Spot Tool to cut out a speck of dust, a spot on a background wall, or sometimes an object. In the latter case, it's usually because I was trying to photograph the device on display and something distracting interfered.
Spot filling removes dust very easily. Generative erasure is an improved version of it. Generative erasing is available in both Photos and Paint, and neither requires an NPU. I know smartphones now allow you to edit photos right on the phone, but Generative Erase is handy for photos stored on OneDrive or elsewhere.
Microsoft is also testing Generative Fill in Paint, which will add objects to your image – so you can add a guy in a gorilla suit to your wedding photo or something like that. However, generative seeding requires an NPU/Copilot+ computer. Just keeping track of what AI features are available and what hardware they require is a daunting task for everyone right now!
Microsoft
