Recently, Microsoft started rolling out a major update for Windows 11 (which Microsoft promises is definitely not Windows 11 version 23H2). One of the big highlights of this release is AI, and a lot of emphasis is put on Copilot, the new AI assistant that Microsoft is injecting into almost every aspect of its products and services. It's supposed to help you get things done, but in reality, it's very lackluster.

Prior to its official availability, I mentioned a few things Microsoft needed to change with Copilot before it could be useful, and nothing has really changed since then, so this initial release is very limited and, in my opinion, frustrating.

Why Copilot isn't great

Without repeating too many of the points I made in my original article back in the summer, Copilot in Windows 11 is still a very undercooked experience. It's mostly a glorified Bing Chat panel that has a little bit of Windows integration, and it really doesn't go far enough. For it to be justified, it really needs to work with all kinds of system settings, integrate with apps, and more. While you can do some Windows things with it, like take a screenshot or start a focus session, it's still very limited. It's also ridiculous that it can start a focus session but not a standard timer, which uses the same Clock app.

Copilot is also pretty frustrating to use. I think it would make far more sense as an overlay rather than a fixed window that squeezes the rest of your apps into a smaller space and just stays open forever. Imagine if the Widgets panel did that, for example. Regardless of how present Copilot is on screen, you have to set focus to it using your keyboard or mouse, so why bother having it take up space? Just let users press the keyboard shortcut to access it when they need to.

Then there's the fact that for everything you try to do, Copilot needs to ask for confirmation. You're using natural language queries that should be pretty easy to understand, but every time, it still wastes your time by asking you to confirm your action, which you have to do by clicking with your mouse, essentially rendering the keyboard shortcut kind of useless since you'll end up having to move the mouse anyway. If you use a command as simple and direct as "start a focus session," it should just start a focus session.

But while this experience feels totally pointless to me, other AI features in Windows 11 are actually really cool.

Snipping Tool is more useful than ever with AI

One of the apps that got an AI upgrade alongside the latest Windows 11 update is Snipping Tool and, in my opinion, this is by far the best and most useful app to get AI. It's nothing we haven't seen before, but Snipping Tool now has OCR support, meaning it can scan screenshots for text. You can copy this text if you want to, but to me, the true usefulness of this feature is in the ability to redact text.

Indeed, once you enable OCR on a file, you get a nifty button labeled Quick redact, which hides sensitive information like email addresses and phone numbers in the screenshot. For work, I was recently working on updating our guide to the Windows 11 Settings app, and I had to take screenshots of dozens of pages, but the Settings app does this thing where your email is always visible in the top-left corner, so I always have to redact it.

Before, I'd just have to open each image in my image editing tool, and I'd usually clone stamp the email out of the screenshot, but now, I could just take a screenshot, open it, and click Quick redact, and it would be gone. It really makes things so much simpler. You can also individually select text and redact it manually, too, so all kinds of sensitive information can be hidden.

All I would really change is I wish I could click the quick redact button without scanning the image for text first. The button should just do it all in one go instead of having to detect text first and then click the redact button. Otherwise, this is incredibly useful.

Paint can now remove backgrounds

Another app that got a big AI upgrade recently is Paint. This one is actually still rolling out and I don't have it on my main PC yet, but it is coming soon. There are two main AI features in Paint, but the one I really care about is background removal. Removing backgrounds from images is something I (and others at XDA) have to do pretty often, and many times we rely on internet tools to remove them automatically. Having that capability built right into Windows is really cool. And what's more, since Paint is a proper image editing tool, you can then make other changes to the image, add other elements, and more.

This feature is greatly helped by support for fully transparent images and for layers, which Paint is also getting alongside background removal. This means you can remove the background of a photo in one layer and merge it with another photo to make a collage more easily. In fact, background removal works per layer, so you can bring in multiple photos in different layers and remove the backgrounds of all of them to focus on just the main subjects of each picture.

Of course, it's not a super precise tool a lot of the time, especially with pictures where it's harder to detect edges and backgrounds. But many of the online tools we'd be using also aren't perfect, and not everyone can afford to use Photoshop to precisely select objects to remove a background. It's really nice to have this more basic implementation readily available.

The other AI feature in Paint is Cocreator, which I frankly don't care about. Any form of AI-generated art just rubs me the wrong way, but yes, you can ask Paint to draw up an image to add to your project, which you can then play with to your liking. It's not a fully free feature, though, and you'll only have a few credits you can use before you have to pay up.

The Photos app gets background blur

Finally, there's the Photos app, which has a cool new feature called background blur. As you can probably guess, this one can blur the background of a photo, putting the main subject in focus. It's a cool effect, and unlike Paint, Photos actually gives you a selection tool, so you can precisely adjust which areas should be blurred and what should remain clear, so you can get the effect much more precise.

It's still not perfect, but I do like the end result if the point is just to make you pop. I tried it with a screenshot of a video of mine, and it worked all right, aside from some poor edge detection around my hair and a weird halo effect around my ears. Still, for a screenshot of a YouTube video, that's not bad, and I think this makes for a cool effect regardless.

Microsoft also boasted some AI-based searching capabilities to help you find specific pictures more easily, though I didn't care too much for this and it doesn't seem to be available yet anyway. The Photos app could already group photos based on the kind of scene in the past, so I'm not entirely sure these capabilities are new.

AI can be cool, but it needs to be actually useful

All of this is to say that AI-powered features can definitely be useful, and it's great to see Microsoft embracing a lot of these capabilities that have been sorely missing in Windows for years. Things like quick redact and background blur legitimately make for a better experience, but what Microsoft is doing with features like Copilot really isn't all that exciting, despite that being Microsoft's biggest focus. So, if you think AI in Windows 11 is stupid (like I did), try to look beyond Microsoft's biggest promises and check out these smaller additions that actually make Windows 11 better.