Microsoft gives a trio of Windows 11 apps some nifty new AI powers, but not everyone will get them
- Microsoft is bringing new AI features to Notepad, Paint and Snipping Tool
- Many of these are for Copilot+ PCs only, though, as they require an NPU
- Notepad is getting a new AI-powered text creation ability which is coming to all Windows 11 PCs, but it needs a Microsoft 365 subscription
Windows 11’s Notepad app is getting its AI powers expanded to include the ability to generate written content from scratch, and Microsoft is providing new AI-related functionality to two other apps in the OS, although all of this remains in testing for now.
Let’s start with Notepad which, with the release of version 11.2504.46.0 (in preview, for Windows 11 testers) adds a new ‘Write’ option. Just right-click where you want some text to be inserted – or anywhere in an empty document if you’re starting with a blank slate – and tell Notepad the nature of the content you want created, and it’ll write something for you.
Windows Latest has had a play with the feature in testing and observes that the AI tends to keep its generated text on the concise side.
If you’re not happy with the results and feel the AI-created content could be better, you can always elect to use the option to ‘Rewrite’ in Notepad, which allows for instructions to lengthen (or shorten) the text, or change the tone (and more besides).
The catch with Notepad’s new AI-powered writing is that it uses what Microsoft calls AI credits.
If you aren’t a Microsoft 365 or Copilot Pro subscriber, you don’t get those credits, and so won’t be able to use this feature. Those with a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family plan get 60 AI credits per month, to be used across all Microsoft’s apps, so you are limited to the extent that you’ll be able to exercise this new power.
Away from Notepad, Microsoft has also added new features to the Paint app and Snipping Tool, and yes, as noted at the outset, all of this is AI-driven stuff. Further bear in mind that as Microsoft explains in a blog post, the following abilities are mostly for Copilot+ PCs only, too (except where I’ve noted otherwise).
Snipping Tool’s fresh addition is something called ‘perfect screenshot’ which lets you select an area of the screen that you wish to grab, but you only need to highlight it roughly. The AI will then refine the window that you’ve drawn to capture, say, an image on the screen. Essentially, this is doing the heavy lifting in terms of cropping an object exactly, meaning you only have to vaguely outline it, and AI does the rest – pretty nifty.
A further move with Snipping Tool (coming to all Windows 11 users in this case) is a color picker ability. This is for the likes of designers who want to know precisely what any given color is on-screen (so they can match it elsewhere, and it’s possible to use HEX, RGB or HSL color codes).
As for Paint, Microsoft is providing a new ‘welcome experience’ (introductory panel explaining its latest features) that’s coming to everyone, too, and there are a couple of new AI tricks here (for Copilot+ PCs only).
First off, Paint is getting an object select tool which uses AI to, well, select objects on the canvas. This is (kind of) the equivalent of the Snipping Tool’s crop selection ability, meaning you can just point to an element of the image and AI will select the object precisely, allowing you to then apply edits.
Secondly, there’s a new sticker generator which again does what it says on the (Paint) tin. You tell the AI that you want a sticker of a tortoise in a leather jacket playing a ‘Flying V’ guitar and it’ll produce a selection of such stickers that you can choose from.
Analysis: Creative sparks and timesaving touches
These are typical uses of AI, of course, encompassing content creation – from paragraphs in Notepad to stickers in Paint – to timesaving little touches in the form of easy selection of objects in Paint, or the swift cropping of an item in a screenshot with Snipping Tool.
All of this should make your life a bit easier, but there are reasons to have a bit of a grumble here. You’ll need a Copilot+ PC in many cases – and okay, that’s because it has the local hardware (an NPU) required to accelerate the task so it works quickly enough – but the subscription requirement for Notepad feels less reasonable.
More broadly, some folks are going to be irked by the changes to Notepad full-stop. Mainly because Notepad is supposed to be a minimalist, streamlined app to fire up to jot quick notes and the like, and it’s slowly becoming a mini version of Word. (Or indeed a new WordPad, which used to be the middle-ground between the two apps, until Microsoft killed it off).
Also, if you were thinking that Notepad already had AI text creation abilities, well, no, it didn’t. While the app has already witnessed the introduction of a Rewrite facility, creating paragraphs from scratch is a new thing (for this app, anyway).
Does Notepad really need it, though? On the face of it, the move can’t hurt – if you don’t want it, don’t use it. But the argument against slowly drafting in more and more features for Notepad is that this bloat will slow it down, making it less responsive (and even more sluggish to load, perhaps).
All of which very much pulls in the wrong direction for those who want a tiny, quickfire jotting pad of an app, which, to be fair, was always the original intent with Notepad. Not so much, these days, that’s for certain.
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