A little while ago, Microsoft teased a new feature for Windows which allowed people to control the operating system using their voice. Some people weren’t so excited about this announcement (including me), but the truth was, the jury was out on how good this feature was until we got to see it in action. Microsoft has tried several times in the past to add proper voice commands to Windows, and the introduction of LLMs that can parse English requests seemed like the perfect time to try again.
Well, the feature began landing on peoples PCs a month ago, and Microsoft wants us all to start using it. To encourage us, the company has begun bringing in tech influencers to show off its capabilities. Unfortunately, a new video posted by Microsoft seems to have done the inverse effect, as users are complaining that Copilot Actions may not be the productivity booster they hoped it’d be.
Microsoft’s new Copilot video shows a pretty sluggish AI assistant
Over on the official Windows X account, the company posted a video showing Judner Aura, a tech content creator with the channel @UrAvgConsumer, trying out the new “Hey, Copilot” feature. The goal was pretty simple: Judner wanted Copilot to adjust the text size on the screen to make it bigger for their grandma. You can see the result below.
So, people have pointed out a few issues with this video. First, Copilot leads Judner down the Display path, when really, it would have done a better job going through the Accessibility tools instead. Regardless, if you go along with what Copilot suggested for a moment, you hit the second problem: Copilot tells Judner to set the scale level to a value it’s already set at. Judner realizes this and manually sets the scale higher. Boom, mission accomplished.
However, one thing this video does show is how powerless Copilot is in its current state. People in the replies make the point that, if they asked an AI assistant to perform a specific job, they’d rather it actually performed the job instead of doing a step-by-step guide.
One may argue that Copilot’s method allows it to teach the user to change the scale by themselves, which fits in the ‘teach a man to fish, and they’ll never go hungry’ mantra. However, power users who already know their way around a system may not get much value out of it, as they can likely perform the job faster than the tour takes to get there. People were likely expecting the assistant to take the initiative, modify the setting itself, and save the user some time; instead, we get a slow tour through the operating system that may not even point out the best option.
The best course of action would be for Microsoft to allow people to ask Copilot how to find and adjust a specific setting for the tour. If they don’t specifically ask for the steps, Copilot should dive into the settings itself and tweak what needs tweaking. Hopefully Microsoft can work on allowing Copilot to do that, else power users won’t touch its AI assistant with a barge pole.