A new Copilot key to kick off the year of AI-powered Windows PCs

[tonyedgecombe]

You can imagine how this came about. Nadella issued a decree that every division has to come up with an idea of how to integrate AI into their product. The keyboard people thought they would add another key. I dread to think what the mouse designers are planning.

[da4id]

If you want to see how something like this might work, I made a fun project where I added a single board computer (SBC) into a keyboard. When you press the 'AI' button, the SBC would send inputs to the LLM on the SBC and output keystrokes to the PC. Demo below if you're curious.

https://youtu.be/BbMSWZKrrcI?si=T_3XIWEtrS8lvxP3

[unraveller]

>what the mouse designers are planning

I predict the trailing mouse effect will stop following the cursor and go on its own adventures with occasional cursor privileges, that's when amazon will invent Just-Hover purchasing and your AI mouse gf will spend all your cash.

[dreamcompiler]

"We just bought ten billion dollars worth of dog food and you are all by god going to eat it."

[dreamcompiler]

Microsoft is obviously making up for their huge mistake of not adding a Bitcoin key ten years ago.

[hubraumhugo]

A good example of why AI favors big tech incumbents. They have all the distribution advantage and can now natively integrate AI into their products.

[xnzakg]

Neat! Hopefully this means we get an extra remappable key on Linux!

[jeroenhd]

Knowing Microsoft they'll probably rebind their Office key/right Windows key rather than adding a new key to the keyboard.

I'm honestly a bit surprised we're still not seeing the emoji key on more keyboards, given how popular emoji are. Do that many people use the right Windows key? Or even the AltGr key in English-speaking locales?

[chrismorgan]

I’m cynical: my guess is it’ll just emit Super+C. My laptop has its row of function keys and their alternative functions are mostly separate keys for controlling the device, but three feel more application-level: ASUS’s “Aura” button is XF86Launch3 (yay!), but the screenshot and presentation mode changing ones are just Super+Shift+S and Super+P, so you can’t do anything novel with them. I’m guessing Copilot will use Super+C, as I presume Cortana’s successor.

[jariz]

This reminds me of that video where LGR reviewed a keyboard with a PIZZA keyboard key. Probably more useful of a usecase than this really... (https://youtu.be/USQxZc9nmtE)

[pzmarzly]

MS has previously been experimenting with replacing Right Windows and Context keys (with Office and Emoji keys): https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/11/20909475/microsoft-offic...

Copilot key doesn't sound all that useful, but still will be much better than Office key

[fouronnes3]

After having gone very far down the rabbit hole of custom keyboards and custom layouts, it's insane how slow innovation is around the "standard" keyboard. I get that backwards compatibility is of utmost importance, but surely we can do better than that.

[Hamuko]

The Office key is apparently just CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + WIN, as Office Key + W is advertised to open Word and Office Key + L is advertised to open LinkedIn, but you can perform both of those actions in plain Windows by just using CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + WIN + W and CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + WIN + L respectively.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/15/23874798/microsoft-window...

[NamTaf]

This feels exactly like back in the early 2000s when I used to physically rip the windows key off my keyboard because I’d accidentally hit it when playing a game and it’d mess everything up.

[Findecanor]

That is such a common nuisance that keyboards marketed specifically to gamers typically have a "Windows lock"/"Gaming mode" that disables the Windows key.

[naikrovek]

there were software solutions to this, even then.

I look forward to being able to remap this key to something that I don't associate with extreme fatigue. to me, a copilot button is like having an "advertisement" button, or something. absolutely useless.

[stabbles]

Hitting that key in-game will increase the difficulty as the computer can leverage more AI

[jacquesm]

Microsoft is just aiming to revive their monopoly but this time through AI. Beware. You think Google is bad? It is. But wait until MS can get their hooks into you with AI products that know just about everything about you and that tattle your every action back to the MotherShip in order to make it that much more sticky.

[LegitShady]

but its not just MSFT doing this. It's literally everyone. Google had such a strong position for so long, and LLMs so suddenly breached that position, that everyone is racing towards the LLM future where they have as much data as they can get their hands on. Google, apple, microsoft, etc.

[apwell23]

> But wait until MS can get their hooks into you with AI products

Is this already priced into their stock price ?

[Xeamek]

How is microsoft worse then any other of the tech giants?

[Bouncingsoul1]

Seems like finally the year of the linux desktop has come.

[shdon]

Unless it can be used as a more or less generic modifier key, I don't really see the point of a key dedicated to this one function. The placement on the keyboard in the photo would suggest that either the space bar is shrunk down or one of the keys to its right is removed to accommodate the new key. That doesn't seem optimal to me. Maybe the dedicated context menu key can be removed, which is equally useless as it replaces just a single mouse click (and feels less predictable than that click, as it's not as obvious where the menu will appear).

Ignoring the marketeer drivel of how "excited" they are and how a single key on a keyboard would make AI any more useful, I have to wonder how many people would actually use it. People who see AI as a threat or distrust it (or just don't think it has a place in an OS) will likely ignore it, disable it, or be annoyed by it. People who are enthusiastic about it would probably be just as likely to simply put it in a prominent spot on the task bar for easy access.

Feels like, just because ChatGPT and Dall-E etc are the "hot (semi-)new thing", this is just an effort to jump on to that bandwagon. I wouldn't be surprised if Copilot (at least insofar as it is integrated in Windows) will meet the same fate as Cortana.

As a practical question (I've not got Win11 and haven't experienced Copilot on there): what does it [i.e. Copilot] actually bring to the Windows desktop experience? Does it make anything more efficient, easier or more discoverable? I can't for the life of me think of a reason I'd need an AI to do any of the stuff I use my desktop OS for. At least the Bing chatbot (while creepy) in Skype makes some sense for the interface, but that doesn't seem to have its tendrils deep into the OS.

[ryanklee]

> I can't for the life of me think of a reason I'd need an AI to do any of the stuff I use my desktop OS for.

If the key can flexibly consume whatever content is in the current context -- images, audio, text, selectable files -- and potentially have access to RAG, it seems to me that the number of potential use cases is very high.

Of course, everything hinges on "flexible" -- if it's mono-modal and doesn't access context in an intuitive way, it'll be tough for it to find a place in people's workflows.

[Findecanor]

> Maybe the dedicated context menu key can be removed, [...]

In my opinion, the Menu key would be better repurposed as a Compose key. It is very useful for typing characters that don't have symbols on the keys, e.g: ♥ ⇒ … — × · ÷ Å Æ Ø Ü.

I have used it in Linux and Solaris, which have support for it if you just enable it. For Windows and MacOS, you'd have to use a third-party utility at the moment.

[baz00]

I really wish they would just piss off with this. I have found no actual real world life improvements on the windows ecosystem from the integration of copilot at all. Anything that it has attempted to do actually removed the determinism I had in the existing process or did something to piss me off. It's like having Mr Clippy shoved down your throat constantly and being told it's a good thing without a single use case making sense for me at all. Literally I can't think of an actual use for it and I've tried. It's like pair programming with a chimp.

I'm still bitter that the menu key seems to have disappeared from the keyboards recently.

[Xeamek]

Can't wait for an LLM query-and-response taking less time then it takes a file explorer to open.

Trully a well designed user experience

[maximus-decimus]

I plan to use it just as much as my Bixby button on my Galaxy phone (not at all)

[Xeamek]

You can rebind it to the normal 'hold-to-shutdown' behavior.

Also you can assign custom action under quick double press.

[Hamuko]

They should just have it say "Copilot" instead of the weird logo they have for Copilot. That way it'd be future-proof for all of the future (AI) products also called Copilot that Microsoft will launch.

[prepend]

I used to use windows a few hours a day. Almost every day I would have to track down a rogue process that pegged my cpu and sometimes disk and would bring other programs to a halt.

It was almost always Cortana or index service or disk defender or something Microsoft added with very good intentions. And I would deprioritize it, or tune it, or disable it if it was optional. And every time, Microsoft would turn it back on against my configuration settings and wishes and it would start messing up my system.

The most frustrating part of this was googling and debugging and finding many other people struggling with this, for years; and Microsoft not fixing it. And it seemed like they would gaslight by saying it didn’t happen, or shouldn’t happen, or it is acceptable that it happened.

I expect that this new feature will suck so hard. I’m glad I rarely use windows these days.

[xg15]

> with very good intentions.

As if.

[thyrox]

Thanks to perplexity it looks like they are adding a new key to the PC keyboard to open copilot. That's the summary I got.

[ceejayoz]

They're replacing the right Windows key with a Copilot key.

[ceejayoz]

Well, that's one way to keep the branding teams from tinkering with the logo.

[llimos]

The Windows logo changed even after they introduced the Windows key

[LorenDB]

It sounds like they are putting fresh paint on the search key that some keyboards already have, whether in the function layer or as a standalone button.

[butz]

Probably Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Win+C was already taken, so all that's left was adding a new key to keyboard.

[MikusR]

That's exactly how the Office or Linkedin keys work. Alt+Shift+Ctrl+Win for Office. Alt+Shift+Ctrl+Win+l for linkedin.

[asgeirn]

Wow. Betcha keyboards with the Official Copilot key®™© will cost plenty of extra.

[naikrovek]

I don't know why someone would think®™© that.

[juancn]

They seem to be replacing the right CTRL key rather than adding a new one.

[TheRealDunkirk]

"You pass butter."

[ourmandave]

What's the Copilot shortcut on a Surface tablet?

[uxp8u61q]

Some people in this thread need to calm down. It's just a new icon for the "super"/windows key. Not a huge conspiracy.