Report: Microsoft is “experimenting” with ways to work AI into bedrock Windows

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft’s efforts to put new AI-powered features into Windows 11 will pick up steam this fall when Windows Copilot is officially released, but the company isn’t stopping there. According to a report from Windows Central, Microsoft is in the early stages of experimenting with new features for built-in Windows apps like Photos, Snipping Tool, and even Paint, which all fall under the broad heading of “AI.”

The report claims that Photos, Camera, and Snipping Tool—all apps that work with either photos or screenshots—could soon include optical character recognition (OCR) features that would allow users to copy and paste text from images into word processors and text editors. The Photos app could also gain the ability to recognize people and objects in photos and make it easier to separate them from their backgrounds.

The venerable MS Paint app, on the other hand, could gain some generative AI functions that would allow it to create images based on text prompts, similar to features currently supported by more high-end image editors like Adobe Photoshop. Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator already uses a DALL-E-based model to create AI-generated images.