You can imagine how this came about. Nadella issued a decree that every division has to come up with an idea of how to integrate AI into their product. The keyboard people thought they would add another key. I dread to think what the mouse designers are planning.
If you want to see how something like this might work, I made a fun project where I added a single board computer (SBC) into a keyboard. When you press the 'AI' button, the SBC would send inputs to the LLM on the SBC and output keystrokes to the PC. Demo below if you're curious.
I predict the trailing mouse effect will stop following the cursor and go on its own adventures with occasional cursor privileges, that's when amazon will invent Just-Hover purchasing and your AI mouse gf will spend all your cash.
Knowing Microsoft they'll probably rebind their Office key/right Windows key rather than adding a new key to the keyboard.
I'm honestly a bit surprised we're still not seeing the emoji key on more keyboards, given how popular emoji are. Do that many people use the right Windows key? Or even the AltGr key in English-speaking locales?
I’m cynical: my guess is it’ll just emit Super+C. My laptop has its row of function keys and their alternative functions are mostly separate keys for controlling the device, but three feel more application-level: ASUS’s “Aura” button is XF86Launch3 (yay!), but the screenshot and presentation mode changing ones are just Super+Shift+S and Super+P, so you can’t do anything novel with them. I’m guessing Copilot will use Super+C, as I presume Cortana’s successor.
> but the screenshot and presentation mode changing ones are just Super+Shift+S and Super+P
For the presentation mode key, it used to be its own independent key, but Microsoft changed its mind and told manufacturers to make it send Win+P instead. Some laptop manufacturers made it depend on the Windows version (through the ACPI _OSI method), so if you pretend to be an older Windows version, it'll have the former behavior instead of Win+P (though doing so could have other negative consequences, see https://mjg59.livejournal.com/85923.html).
Unfortunately, this was long ago enough (or the search engines got bad enough at searching old stuff) that I'm not finding the place where I originally read about that; the most I could find was a StackOverflow answer (https://askubuntu.com/questions/62319/is-there-an-equivalent...).
This reminds me of that video where LGR reviewed a keyboard with a PIZZA keyboard key. Probably more useful of a usecase than this really... (https://youtu.be/USQxZc9nmtE)
After having gone very far down the rabbit hole of custom keyboards and custom layouts, it's insane how slow innovation is around the "standard" keyboard. I get that backwards compatibility is of utmost importance, but surely we can do better than that.
The Office key is apparently just CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + WIN, as Office Key + W is advertised to open Word and Office Key + L is advertised to open LinkedIn, but you can perform both of those actions in plain Windows by just using CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + WIN + W and CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + WIN + L respectively.
The Office key shortcuts get bound by Explorer when it starts. If you bind the keys when Explorer does not run, you own them and can then free them after Explorer has started.
This feels exactly like back in the early 2000s when I used to physically rip the windows key off my keyboard because I’d accidentally hit it when playing a game and it’d mess everything up.
That is such a common nuisance that keyboards marketed specifically to gamers typically have a "Windows lock"/"Gaming mode" that disables the Windows key.
I look forward to being able to remap this key to something that I don't associate with extreme fatigue. to me, a copilot button is like having an "advertisement" button, or something. absolutely useless.
Microsoft is just aiming to revive their monopoly but this time through AI. Beware. You think Google is bad? It is. But wait until MS can get their hooks into you with AI products that know just about everything about you and that tattle your every action back to the MotherShip in order to make it that much more sticky.
but its not just MSFT doing this. It's literally everyone. Google had such a strong position for so long, and LLMs so suddenly breached that position, that everyone is racing towards the LLM future where they have as much data as they can get their hands on. Google, apple, microsoft, etc.
It's definitely not just MSFT doing this. But MSFT is the one I worry about most because they've shown in the past that they don't hesitate to employ really shady tactics if they think that it will get them an advantage and they can get away with it.
Arguably of a slightly worse shade than Google and Apple, though the latter have plenty in the skeleton cupboards as well.
Unless it can be used as a more or less generic modifier key, I don't really see the point of a key dedicated to this one function. The placement on the keyboard in the photo would suggest that either the space bar is shrunk down or one of the keys to its right is removed to accommodate the new key. That doesn't seem optimal to me. Maybe the dedicated context menu key can be removed, which is equally useless as it replaces just a single mouse click (and feels less predictable than that click, as it's not as obvious where the menu will appear).
Ignoring the marketeer drivel of how "excited" they are and how a single key on a keyboard would make AI any more useful, I have to wonder how many people would actually use it. People who see AI as a threat or distrust it (or just don't think it has a place in an OS) will likely ignore it, disable it, or be annoyed by it. People who are enthusiastic about it would probably be just as likely to simply put it in a prominent spot on the task bar for easy access.
Feels like, just because ChatGPT and Dall-E etc are the "hot (semi-)new thing", this is just an effort to jump on to that bandwagon. I wouldn't be surprised if Copilot (at least insofar as it is integrated in Windows) will meet the same fate as Cortana.
As a practical question (I've not got Win11 and haven't experienced Copilot on there): what does it [i.e. Copilot] actually bring to the Windows desktop experience? Does it make anything more efficient, easier or more discoverable? I can't for the life of me think of a reason I'd need an AI to do any of the stuff I use my desktop OS for. At least the Bing chatbot (while creepy) in Skype makes some sense for the interface, but that doesn't seem to have its tendrils deep into the OS.
> I can't for the life of me think of a reason I'd need an AI to do any of the stuff I use my desktop OS for.
If the key can flexibly consume whatever content is in the current context -- images, audio, text, selectable files -- and potentially have access to RAG, it seems to me that the number of potential use cases is very high.
Of course, everything hinges on "flexible" -- if it's mono-modal and doesn't access context in an intuitive way, it'll be tough for it to find a place in people's workflows.
My question wasn't about the key per se (which is just a trigger for Copilot, it seems), but about what Copilot itself brings. Can it do any of the stuff you describe?
I'm addressing your particular point about not seeing any use for this in the OS. I disagree. If there is a flexible layer that can consume and correlate context, there are tons of use cases
Then indeed there might be. I'm not saying AI is useless in general, even though it might be totally irrelevant to my personal workflow. But my question is still what Copilot brings. Does it do what you describe? If not, what does it do?
Yeah, I doubt it does anything close to what I'm talking about. If it did, it would be a massive leap forward in integration. More likely, the button opens up Copilot side-bar and only takes text input. But we shall see. Maybe some RAG going on, maybe a bit capable of multimodal, but I'd be a little surprised if there's more than the usual "prompt LLM here".
> Maybe the dedicated context menu key can be removed, [...]
In my opinion, the Menu key would be better repurposed as a Compose key.
It is very useful for typing characters that don't have symbols on the keys, e.g: ♥ ⇒ … — × · ÷ Å Æ Ø Ü.
I have used it in Linux and Solaris, which have support for it if you just enable it. For Windows and MacOS, you'd have to use a third-party utility at the moment.
I really wish they would just piss off with this. I have found no actual real world life improvements on the windows ecosystem from the integration of copilot at all. Anything that it has attempted to do actually removed the determinism I had in the existing process or did something to piss me off. It's like having Mr Clippy shoved down your throat constantly and being told it's a good thing without a single use case making sense for me at all. Literally I can't think of an actual use for it and I've tried. It's like pair programming with a chimp.
I'm still bitter that the menu key seems to have disappeared from the keyboards recently.
They should just have it say "Copilot" instead of the weird logo they have for Copilot. That way it'd be future-proof for all of the future (AI) products also called Copilot that Microsoft will launch.
I used to use windows a few hours a day. Almost every day I would have to track down a rogue process that pegged my cpu and sometimes disk and would bring other programs to a halt.
It was almost always Cortana or index service or disk defender or something Microsoft added with very good intentions. And I would deprioritize it, or tune it, or disable it if it was optional. And every time, Microsoft would turn it back on against my configuration settings and wishes and it would start messing up my system.
The most frustrating part of this was googling and debugging and finding many other people struggling with this, for years; and Microsoft not fixing it. And it seemed like they would gaslight by saying it didn’t happen, or shouldn’t happen, or it is acceptable that it happened.
I expect that this new feature will suck so hard. I’m glad I rarely use windows these days.
You may find it difficult to believe, but the people who work at Microsoft are people just like you. They have goals and get caught up in the whims of management, who are also people who get caught up in the whims of various things at various times.
I’m sure the engineers are nice people. But it would suck to have to compromise design to make the crappy stuff that just randomly eats processors.
This would make me sad and fortunately, I think engineers have a lot of choice over where they work. So if people are consciously building this stuff then I think it’s more likely that they drank the koolaid and agree than they are forced against their will to be crappy.
The employees at Microsoft, sure. Microsoft-the-company, i.e. the board and management? Nope. Or otherwise, explain to me where the myriads of nagscreens, the push for locked, hardwired bootloaders, the embrace/extend/extinguish stance and the general anticompetitive behaviour comes from. (Not even starting with all the tracking).
SecureBoot comes from wanting a secure boot process. If you’ve ever had a rootkit or boot sector virus you understand what this is for. If you hate Microsoft you say that SecureBoot is stealing your freedom or something else equally insane.
Nag screens and ads in the OS are things which an MBA tell you to do. Do not single out Microsoft for putting ads for their own products in their own products, because Microsoft weren’t the first to do this, they weren’t even the millionth company to do this. Being an OS doesn’t make Windows immune to this, as much as you or I may hate it.
If you’re a developer you understand telemetry. If you hate Microsoft you call it spying because “telemetry” doesn’t get people angry like “spying” does, so you say “spying.”
You’re gonna need to be specific about the EEE stuff. I don’t know of an example of that since the 1990s or maybe the early 2000s.
> If you hate Microsoft you say that SecureBoot is stealing your freedom or something else equally insane.
Secure Boot itself is perfectly sensible, for the reasons you describe. What's not sensible is hardwiring a key so that not even the user itself can change it.
> Nag screens and ads in the OS are things which an MBA tell you to do [...] Being an OS doesn’t make Windows immune to this, as much as you or I may hate it.
I can't think of any other operating system that has nag screens built in (as opposed to "hey, look at this new feature" toasts, which are also annoying but at least not deliberately designed to block your workflow).
> You’re gonna need to be specific about the EEE stuff. I don’t know of an example of that since the 1990s or maybe the early 2000s.
I'll give you that. I was actually thinking about the historical stuff here, but, true, that doesn't have to reflect current strategy.
> If you hate Microsoft you call it spying because “telemetry” doesn’t get people angry like “spying” does, so you say “spying.”
I can get just as angry about "telemetry" from other companies, no worries. To a certain degree, it's a useful improvement for the development process. What I see not as legitimate is e.g. using telemetry data to train AI, or give no options to turn off collection. Microsoft does the first e.g. with handwriting recognition, the second with "mandatory" information.
You're absolutely right that all of those are industry-wide trends where the competition is no better. I think where Microsoft is currently special however is the pure manner of aggressiveness of their nagscreens. It's also a difference if you implement this stuff in an application that the user can uninstall or directly in the OS.
> Secure Boot itself is perfectly sensible, for the reasons you describe. What's not sensible is hardwiring a key so that not even the user itself can change it.
Users CAN change the key. If you have a motherboard that doesn’t allow that, that’s on you and/or the hardware vendor, not Microsoft.
No, sorry. If you work for Microsoft you've lost me. That takes a departure from any kind of ethics. I'm fine with it, people want to get paid. But you do this sort of thing if you don't care about the world of software or where it is headed. This isn't exclusive to Microsoft, but it definitely applies to them.
The company's vision as a whole is to throw some effort at everything and write off what turns out crap. Everyone I knew was on board with that. I was not. That's not a vision, that's distributed incompetence.
Hmm, I was looking at the extended keyboard layouts previously had doubled Windows keys; that's a pretty clear spot to put it there. Looks like a lot of laptops don't have the doubled-Windows keys?
Depending on the size of the keyboard and on the size of your hands, using the left modifier for that shortcut might need two hands instead of just one; it's very convenient to be able to quickly lock the desktop with only one hand.
I just tested and,on a full size model m, I can still stretch 2.5 inches after reaching the left+win from my pinkie and l with my thumb. And I have average hand span for a man.
It sounds like they are putting fresh paint on the search key that some keyboards already have, whether in the function layer or as a standalone button.
