New Windows 11 PCs Will Soon Come With Dedicated Copilot Key

After Microsoft brought its new Copilot assistant to millions of Windows 11 and Windows 10 users last Fall, the company has just announced a big change to make Copilot even more integrated into Windows 11 PCs: A dedicated Copilot key.

This new Copilot key will appear on the keyboards of new Windows 11 PCs that will start shipping later this month, with new models to be announced ahead of CES 2024. The company also mentioned that new Surface devices coming this year will ship with this new Copilot key.

“The introduction of the Copilot key marks the first significant change to the Windows PC keyboard in nearly three decades. We believe it will empower people to participate in the AI transformation more easily,” explained Yusuf Mehdi, EVP and Consumer Chief Marketing Officer at Microsoft.

The exec emphasized that the introduction of this dedicated Copilot key is the biggest change to the PC keyboard since the addition of the Windows key nearly 30 years ago. “We see this as another transformative moment in our journey with Windows where Copilot will be the entry point into the world of AI on the PC,” Mehdi said.

In practice, pressing the Copilot key will open the AI assistant on the desktop, just as if you clicked on the Copilot shortcut in the Windows taskbar. However, on PCs where Copilot is not available or disabled, pressing the Copilot key will just launch Windows Search.

Microsoft designed Copilot as an “everyday AI companion” that can help Windows users to be more productive. Copilot provides free access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 and DALL·E 3 models, and Microsoft 365 commercial customers can also pay for the Copilot for Microsoft 365 experience that integrates the AI assistant with the Office apps, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Whiteboard, and Microsoft Loop.

Thanks to new AI experiences like Copilot and recent chips from Intel and AMD that include dedicated AI coprocessors, Microsoft believes that 2024 will be the year of the AI PC. “We will continue to build Windows to be the destination for the best AI experiences. This will require an operating system that blurs the lines between local and cloud processing,” Mehdi said today.

While Copilot is currently available on both Windows 11 and Windows 10, the next version of Windows coming later this year, which may or may not be called “Windows 12,” is expected to go all-in on AI. According to a recent report, one of the biggest changes in this update could be a more integrated Copilot Assistant that can run in the background to assist users throughout the day.