Copilot

Windows 11 version 23H2 introduces a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) companion called Copilot that combines the content creation capabilities and intelligence of Bing Chat with a limited selection of useful Windows setting configuration features.
In its initial release, Copilot in Windows 11 is available in preview in North America and parts of Asia and South America. But it will come to additional markets over time.
Copilot appears as a sidebar on the Windows 11 Desktop, and it provides a text-based interface by which you can ask questions and interact with the underlying AI capabilities.

Copilot in Windows 11 is just one of many copilots--AI-based assistants--that Microsoft is introducing across its various products and services. Underpinning this interface is a set of foundational AI-based services called Microsoft Copilot that is also used by Bing Chat, Bing Image Creator, the AI capabilities in Microsoft Edge, and Microsoft 365 Copilot for businesses (and, soon, for consumers too). This common foundation means that when third-party developers extend the capabilities of any of these offerings that this new functionality will work with all of these offerings.
A bit of history
To understand Copilot, one needs to understand how we got here. After all, this and the other new AI capabilities Microsoft is introducing in Windows 11 version 23H2 seemed to come out of nowhere. So here is a short slice of recent history that helps it.

In January 2023, Microsoft announced that it was expanding its multi-year, multi-billion-dollar investment in the pioneering AI firm OpenAI with the express aim of "completely transforming" every Microsoft product with AI capabilities. Previous to this, AI was seen as something futuristic. But OpenAI's rapid AI advances had reached the point where Microsoft felt the technology could be used more broadly.

In February 2023, Microsoft announced Bing Chat, an "AI-powered copilot for the web," built on OpenAI's ChatGPT and a proprietary Microsoft AI model called Prometheus that it said provided "more relevant, timely and targeted results with improved safety." Like ChatGPT, Bing Chat is what's sometimes called a chatbot. It's an alternative to traditional web search that uses a chat experience similar to text messaging that lets users easily refine complex searches using text-based prompts until they get what they're looking for. Bing Chat can also summarize information and even generate written content: For example, it can help you compose an email or other correspondence, kickstart a blog post, resume, or other work, and even personalize the tone, length, phrasing, and other aspects of its output.

In March 2023, Microsoft announced Bing Image Creator, an AI-powered image creation tool based on OpenAI's DALL-E technologies. As with that tool, users can simply describe the image they have in mind using a text prompt, and Bing Image Creator will generate multiple versions, and in a wide range of styles, fr...