7 AI Features You Must Try in Windows 11: No Copilot PC Required

The global PC market has seen a strong start to 2024, with shipments already up year-on-year. The buzz around AI PCs seems to be one of the main drivers behind this growth, and it’s only expected to get stronger. Microsoft’s introduction of its AI assistant Copilot and a slew of new Copilot and Copilot+ laptops this year have reignited the spark for Windows laptops. AI features are the main attraction here, and just like in the smartphone world, you can now do things like have AI generate a professional-looking image or drawing, easily separate an object from its background, or add an aesthetic blur behind an object, and more.

AI features can be found in many default Windows apps, such as Paint and Photos. They let you perform tasks like copying and pasting text from an image, removing an object from its background, and more.

Many of these AI features work best with newer hardware, especially processors that have a dedicated NPU to handle all of this work. While some are exclusive to newer Copilot+ laptops or laptops with an NPU, there are also some pretty useful ones that work well on existing Windows 11 laptops. If you have a Windows 11 PC, here are some cool AI features you should be using right away.

Co-pilot

This is one feature you’ve probably noticed by now. If you’re upgrading Windows, the Copilot logo should be in the right corner of your taskbar. Similar to ChatGPT, you can ask Copilot for facts, generate text snippets, edit homework, generate project ideas, and pretty much anything else. Copilot goes a step further, as it can open apps, change any Windows settings, analyze text from a screenshot or image, and more.

You can even enable plugins to find restaurant recommendations, compose a song, or buy products and find the best prices. Some plugins are US-centric for now. You can even ask Copilot to generate an image for a logo, blog post, or anything else with just a text prompt. This is incredibly useful and you should try it if you haven’t already.

Creating an image in Paint

This feature isn’t available in India yet, but you can easily enable it by simply changing your region in Settings. Make sure you’re running the latest version of Windows (23H2) and that there are no pending updates. If you don’t see the “Image Creator” button (just before “Layers” in the toolbar) in Paint yet, here’s what you need to do:

Open Settings > Time & Language > Region

In the “Country or region” field, select United States

Now open Paint again and you should have the feature. Microsoft is rolling it out in stages, so you’ll likely need to join the waiting list. Once the feature is live, you should be able to generate AI graphics from text prompts and choose a style for the graphics. Generating AI graphics requires credits, and Microsoft gives you 50 credits when you join. If you don’t want to bother with the waiting list, you can start using Microsoft Designer right away, where you get 15 free tokens per day for creating AI graphics.

Removing a background in Paint

One AI feature in Paint that doesn’t require any tokens is background removal. You’ll find the logo just below the Crop button. One press will automatically analyze the photo, detect the subject, and remove the background. You can then save the foreground image or copy it to another canvas. It’s a quick and easy way to remove the background from an object.

Blurring the background in photos

The Photos app in Windows 11 just got even more powerful with this cool feature. Once you have a photo open, press Edit or Ctrl+E to go to the editing menu. Here, the last icon on the top bar is the background remover. Once you press it, the image will be analyzed and the background will be automatically masked. By turning on the “Background Brush Tool” toggle, you can mask more parts of the image or even unmask the areas you don’t want to blur.

Once you have done this, you can choose to blur the background and adjust the intensity of the blur, remove the background completely or replace it with a solid color of your choice. It is quite a powerful and simple tool to use, which is great when you are in a hurry.

Text recognition in the Snipping Tool

Have you ever wanted to quickly copy an address or email from a screenshot you just took? Now you can do just that with the “Text Actions” feature in the Snipping Tool. After taking a screenshot, tap the notification icon in the lower right corner. The screenshot will open in the Snipping Tool app. From here, simply tap the “Text Actions” button in the toolbar, and all text in the screenshot will automatically be selectable. Now you can copy all or parts of the text to paste elsewhere. Phone numbers and email addresses can also be instantly deleted with the “Quick Delete” button.

AI Editing in Clipchamp

Clipchamp is a handy video editing tool for Windows 11 that can handle basic editing. If you don’t want to bother with editing yourself, you can outsource the task to AI with Auto compose. Once you open the Clipchamp app and log in, you’ll see an option to “Create Video with AI” on the home page. Tap on it, and you’ll get a four-step video creation process.

Simply add all the images and video clips you need, choose a theme for your video, choose the orientation and length of the clip, and preview the clip before exporting. You can change the background music and fonts, and even edit it manually if you want to fine-tune it even more. This is very useful if you want to quickly create reels for social media and don’t want to get your hands dirty with editing.

Copilot in Edge browser

Copilot is also available as a popup in Microsoft Edge and has some cool features. You can use it to summarize a long article you have open in a tab, write an email or blog post and choose the length and tone of the text, or ask it to find more information about a topic you’re reading on a website. All the features from the main Copilot menu are also available here.

Written by: Roydon Cerejo