Microsoft Copilot and Smart Windows Apps on ASUS AI PCs

Feb 19, 2024

What is Microsoft Copilot? What relevance does it have with an AI PC? Is Copilot really capable of making our lives easier? Many say that 2024 is “the year of AI laptops”. If you have doubts or questions about what this means, read on. This article offers a complete walkthrough of Microsoft Copilot features available in new ASUS laptops. By the end of the article, you’ll have a better idea of whether AI PCs are a good fit for your lifestyle.

Microsoft Copilot is a tool embedded into Microsoft 365 applications which combines capabilities of large language models (LLMs) with data in Microsoft Graph, which accesses information across Microsoft 365 services and provides productivity assistance. Microsoft Copilot can answer questions, summarise text, turn text to images, create and animate slides, and a lot more. These AI abilities make Copilot capable of helping you complete tasks faster.

ASUS offers a range of new laptops equipped with Microsoft Copilot. The elegant, thin, and light Zenbook 14 OLED comes with either an AMD Ryzen™ 8040 series processor (UM3406) or an Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 processor (UX3405). This slim chassis weighing only 1.2 kg with a profile of 14.9mm features a dedicated NPU and a stunning 3K ASUS Lumina OLED panel.

ASUS Vivobook S 16 OLED and ASUS Vivobook S 14 OLED are slim, powerful machines made for practicality. Available with either an Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 Processor or an AMD Ryzen™ 9 8940HS Processor, both models feature an NPU that supports AI workloads. Each model offers a long lasting 75 watt-hour battery. Besides being capable of handling everyday tasks efficiently, these two ASUS Vivobook S laptop models also provide comfortable viewing and typing experiences with their ergonomic single-zone RGB backlit keyboard, enlarged touchpad, and up to 3.2K 120 Hz ASUS Lumina OLED panels.

ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED (N6506) is powered by an Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 185H processor and a dedicated NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 4060 Laptop GPU with NVIDIA® Studio Drivers. It’s a workhorse that is perfect for digital artists and content-creation enthusiasts. The ASUS DialPad embedded on its trackpad enables users to tweak parameters in their creative apps and browsers more efficiently.

As the name implies, Microsoft Copilot powered by AI is designed to assist with tasks along the way. You can call out Copilot in Bing chat by pressing the Windows key plus “c”. A Copilot chat window will pop up without obscuring your opened browser or apps.

With Copilot chat launched, you’ll be able to do several things in this window. Copilot can help you tweak settings, provide suggestions, and create images based on questions asked in Copilot chat. You can ask it to perform simple tasks such as "turn on do not disturb", or you can ask it to provide gift ideas for your friend’s upcoming birthday. Simply give Copilot a summary of your friend’s personality such as “I need a gift for my friend who is an outdoorsy person and loves to hike” - and watch Copilot produce a list of suggestions.

If you’re short on time, you can open Microsoft Edge to browse information about a topic and ask Copilot to give you a summary of it in bullet points. To make things more personalized and natural, you can also select the tone of voice preferred for Copilot. The options include conversation styles of More Creative, More Balanced, or More Precise – so switch things up as you prefer!

In addition to helping with everyday tasks, Copilot also has a creative side. You can write a description of the image you would like to create, and Copilot will generate three options for you to choose from. Hit a bottleneck? You can turn to Copilot for inspiration! Ask Copilot to write a song on a specified theme or copywrite a paragraph on a selected topic and Copilot will provide results in no time.

Easing the Workload for Professionals

Copilot in Windows 11* offers multiple features designed to assist modern professionals. This is achieved through combining the power of LLMs with Microsoft Graph data and Microsoft apps like Outlook, Teams, PowerPoint, Excel, Word, and more. All these apps are equipped with smart capabilities.

For example, composing emails can be quite time consuming. Copilot eases this workload by scanning through received emails and sending prompts of suggested responses to them. Instead of going through long, tedious emails word by word, you also have the option of asking Copilot to summarise an email in concise bullet points. Similarly, meeting minutes can be produced automatically after a Teams meeting and captions can be created while the meeting is in progress.

Have you ever spent a whole afternoon making slides to summarise a topic? Copilot can help you save time on this so you can focus on other important things – simply ask Copilot to draft up slides on a certain subject with images. Or, if you have an excel chart with a lot of encrypted data, you can command Copilot to read through, analyze, and produce a report on it.

Along with Microsoft Copilot, an array of smart Microsoft apps are now featured in Windows 11. There’s Microsoft Paint, in which you can generate images based on descriptions. Like Microsoft Copilot capabilities, this app allows you to make more detailed adjustments to images. For instance, you can remove backgrounds in a snap and switch them out for other preferred styles. Images can be layered and reorganized, different illustration styles can also be chosen and applied to the same image – all giving users more creative imagination and freedom.

In addition, the Snipping tool now offers more ways to capture and copy desired content in further detail. Text can be auto detected on a selected image and users have the option of either copying all detected text, or only copying redacted text with sensitive information hidden.

You can also interact with Copilot based on the Snipping Tool interface. For example, you can ask Copilot to suggest sites along a route based on a screenshot of a map from your starting point to the destination.

Upgrades to existing apps like Photos are also part of Windows 11. Now you can turn your photos and videos into slideshows in a snap and share summaries of the day with friends and family. Adjustments like blurring the background, adjusting blur intensity, removing the background, or switching out the background can be easily accomplished.

With the new Microsoft Clipchamp you can create videos like a pro in a few steps. Upload the chosen media, choose your video style from various templates, select either landscape or portrait aspect ratio and set the video duration; then finally, pick out a music track and font style. The entire process takes only a few minutes!

Microsoft Copilot and smart Microsoft apps are not where the wonders of AI end. In this year of AI laptops ASUS has released innovative, groundbreaking new products such as Zenbook DUO (2024), ASUS NUC 14 Pro, ASUS ExpertBook CX54 Chromebook Plus, and more. Check out our latest models announced at CES 2024 and discover more AI-ready tech!

* Copilot for Microsoft 365 may not be available for all markets and languages. To purchase, enterprise customers must have a license for Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 or Office 365 E3 or E5, and business customers must have a license for Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Business Premium. Copilot is currently supported in the following languages: English (US, GB, AU, CA, IN), Spanish (ES, MX), Japanese, French (FR, CA), German, Portuguese (BR), Italian, and Chinese Simplified. We plan to support the following languages (in alphabetical order) over the first half of 2024: Arabic, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (PT), Russian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Ukrainian.