Microsoft’s unified Copilot is coming to Windows, Edge, and everywhere else

Today, Microsoft announced a new unified Copilot experience in Windows 11, launching on September 26th. The new “everyday AI companion,” now called Microsoft Copilot in Windows, will be “seamlessly available across all the apps and experiences you use most,” including the Windows 11 desktop, Microsoft 365, Outlook, the Edge browser, and (uh) Bing.

During the event, Yusuf Mehdi, consumer chief marketing officer, called Copilot “a handshake between you and technology — available when you need it and out of the way when you don’t.”

Copilot will uniquely incorporate the context and intelligence of the web, your work data and what you are doing in the moment on your PC to provide better assistance – with your privacy and security at the forefront. It will be a simple and seamless experience, available in Windows 11, Microsoft 365, and in our web browser with Edge and Bing. It will work as an app or reveal itself when you need it with a right click.

With the appropriate permissions, the new Copilot will be able to pull data from your calendar, email, documents, and more to help you quickly draft texts and emails, and it’ll make suggestions in real time in apps like Outlook. It’ll also be able to pull context from Bing Mobile and Edge on your smartphone.

Copilot in Windows will let you control parts of the desktop experience with voice or text commands — in the video above, it’s shown arranging windows, toggling dark mode, launching specific Spotify playlists, generating full paragraphs of confident-sounding prose on minimalistic architecture, and removing photo backgrounds. That’s a big step up from the current Start menu text box, which in my experience generally either fails to find relevant files and settings on the computer, or outsources to Bing and fails to find them on the web. We’ll see!