Microsoft has been working hard to make Copilot+ PCs enticing after they made their debut on June 18th, 2024, especially since the initial wave of exclusive features didn't do all that much for users. The (repeated) delay of Recall was a big hit to the appeal of this whole concept, but in early October, Microsoft announced a few more features coming to Copilot+ PCs, with the first of them rolling out a couple of weeks later.

That feature was Super Resolution, an option in the Photos app that upscales your photos and images to be a higher resolution. It's not a bad option to have, but in today's world, an image's resolution is rarely ever its main problem relative to things like lighting, noise, and so on. I still feel like Microsoft is totally missing the true potential of Copilot+, and I have some ideas on what the company could do to make it better rather than waste time with relatively uninteresting features.

Change PC settings with natural language

Don't make me dig through the app

I've already talked about this last year when Copilot first started appearing in Windows and it could actually change certain system settings. Microsoft's response to my request for more functionality was to scrap that feature entirely in favor of a web app for Copilot, but I think Copilot+ poses a new opportunity for this feature to work even better.

Since Copilot+ is a set of features running locally on your PC, you wouldn't need the internet to process your commands, and rather than depending on the usual Copilot chat interface from the web, this could just be built into a proper part of Windows, such as Search. AI's ability to understand natural language and interpret it could enable users to change really complex settings much more quickly. For example, a user could ask their computer to change the refresh rate instead of going deep into the Settings app to do it. It could change the theme color, disable notifications for an app, and so on.

The Settings app has become somewhat convoluted, which is a natural consequence of just how much there is in it, but using natural language and AI would make things so much easier for so many people. Even for power users, this would shift the main interface to the keyboard, which many of them prefer over using the mouse to click. To me, it's a no-brainer.

Translate text on any screen

Why do we need an app?

To be honest, I'm not sure how much of this requires AI as it is commonly referred to these days, but if we want things to be more accessible to everyone, I think having Copilot+ translate everything you see on screen is a fantastic place to start. We already have live captions with translation to translate videos and audio played on your PC, so doing the same for text should be even easier.

I think this could be a feature that's available as part of the Click To Do capability that Microsoft introduced at the start of October. Simply allow users to summon Copilot+ at any time to translate the content on the entire screen, or in a given window. It should be able to keep translating as you scroll a page, too, so you can fully read an article without having to constantly summon the tool again. And importantly, it should work in any app, simply reading what's on your screen using optical character recognition.

Change power settings automatically

Power modes are unintuitive for the user

For years now, we've had to deal with manufacturers advertising certain performance and battery life numbers, only for those number to be somewhat observable when you choose the right power setting. If you want great performance, you need to choose the Best performance power mode in Windows, and if you want decent battery life, you need the Balanced power mode. It may sound logical when you read it, but in reality, users just aren't going to do that every time, so they either choose bad battery life, or subpar performance.

Now, this was significantly addressed in hardware recently. Snapdragon X PCs offer their best performance in either power mode, and while Intel Lunar Lake chips still require the Best performance mode to reach their full potential, it can now achieve excellent battery life in this mode too. But this is something users should never have to think about.

Using whatever intelligence is necessary, Copilot+ should be able to determine the level of power required for a given workload at a given moment. If you're running Photoshop and it's obvious that CPU and RAM usage is being pushed hard and it could benefit from fully unleashing the processor, it should do exactly that. When the tasks you're running aren't pushing your system resources, it should slow down. Again, I don't know how much AI is required for something like this, but the point remains that it shouldn't be something users have to worry about.

Transcribe audio and generate subtitles

More than live captions

I'm mentioning live captions for a second time in this article because, once again, I think there's potential for more. Yes, live captions are useful for accessibility if you're watching a video or listening to an audio recording, but they only work in real time, and not all hardware will support it. Subtitling videos or transcribing audio is something that Copilot+ should absolutely be able to do, not just in real-time, but generating a file that users can always have access to and modify to correct certain potential errors.

Take the Sound Recorder app, for example. Transcribing what's being said in a recording should be a no-brainer of a feature to have — smartphones like the Pixel family have it, and multiple services exist to offer this kind of tool for meetings. After transcribing, you can edit parts of a recording if necessary to improve accuracy, and that file an then be shared with others if needed.

For videos, Copilot+ could even generate a proper SRT file that could be loaded in a video player to include the subtitles as the video plays, no matter what device the video is played on. It would be a huge upgrade for accessibility tht wouldn't force users to rely on specific features that may not be available to everyone.

Photo Unblur

And other photo features

I've mentioned this point multiple times before already, but Super Resolution isn't really the feature that's going to make photos look a lot better these days. Most phones have 48MP cameras producing 12MP images, which is more than sharp enough. What we need are features that enhance photos in ways that are much more of a problem.

First off, unblurring photos. I keep bringing this feature up because Google introduced it in its Pixel phones years ago, and it's beyond useful. I have somewhat shaky hands while taking pictures, and my current camera lens doesn't have optical image stabilization, so some of my pictures come out a little blurry. The option to unblur photos would improve the quality of my photos far more than increasing the resolution, considering I'm already shooting 24MP images. And this is a feature that's not found on a lot of software, even including Photoshop (it used to exist, but it was removed).

But there are other things, too. A relatively simple automatic enhancement feature in the Photos app would be very welcome, too. In fact, I think this used to exist at some point, but with the power of AI, determining the appropriate brightness levels could be done much more accurately for any image. I always use auto enhance in Photoshop, and it would be awesome to have here.

And while I'm dreaming, I'll ask for an AI-based denoise feature like Photoshop has. The Photoshop feature runs on the GPU, which makes it not optimal for a lot of devices, especially Snapdragon PCs, but something that wuns on the NPU could work a lot better on modern thin-and-light laptops.

Copilot+ has a ton of potential

I've been somewhat critical of Copilot+ PCs so far, but I think the idea of a PC that can leverage AI to make life easier for users is absolutely a great thing. I just feel like Microsoft has been missing the mark somewhat with the features it has been implementing, which feel more like they're cobbled together to have something available rather than be actually useful.

The features I've listed above would go a long way in making Copilot+ actually useful for a significant number of users, and it would encourage that many more of them to buy a new computer. Along with the fact that Windows 10 is reaching end-of-life status next year, this is a great opportunity to entice more users to buy this new hardware. Whether it will happen is entirely up to Microsoft.