Microsoft just rolled out a major update for Windows 11, and other changes are currently being tested in the Windows Insider program. Welcome back to Windows Wednesday—here’s everything Microsoft rolled out in Windows this week.
You canjoin the Windows Insider programto try out experimental features, but some changes are on a gradual rollout and not yet available to all Insider program members. You should not install Windows Insider builds on an important computer.
Big Feature Rollout
Many of the features that have been tested in Insider channels for the past few months arenow rolling out to the stable version of Windows 11, starting with this week’s Windows 11 non-security preview update and app updates in the Microsoft Store. The list of changes includes a natural language search in the Settings app, the Click to Do menu for on-screen text and images, Draft with Copilot in Word, automatic cropping in Snipping Tool, and more. The Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) is alsochanging to a black background.
Most of these features use on-device AI models and require aCopilot+ PC. If you don’t have a fancy new PC, not much is changing for you right now.
Describe Image Action in Click to Do
Microsoft started testing the ‘Describe image’ action in theClick to Do menua while ago, which creates a text description of the selected image. It was previously limited to Copilot+ PCs with Snapdragon processors, but it’s also now available to models with Intel and AMD processors as well.
The ‘Describe image’ action is currently available in the Windows Insiders Beta channel. There’s no word yet on when it could roll out to PCs on the stable Windows 11 release channel.
Image Descriptions in Narrator
If you see a picture of a house in a website or application, blind or partially sighted people might only hear “image” or some other unhelpful description, because screen readers can (usually) only repeat whatever information is provided by the content. The Narrator screen reader in Windows is fixing that with a new image description feature.
A blog post explained, “With this new feature that is beginning to roll out, Narrator will now generate richer image descriptions on your Copilot+ PC. Simply press Narrator key + Ctrl + D and Narrator will read out a contextual description of the image describing people, objects, colors, text, and numbers from the image. On non-Copilot+ PCs, this experience will continue to give you very basic image descriptions.”
This feature uses on-device AI models, which is why it requires the NPU found in Copilot+ PCs. Hopefully, Microsoft can port this to PCs that already have the GPU horsepower for those lightweight models, but it’s not clear if that will happen. This is currently being tested in the Beta Channel.
Copilot Vision Desktop Share
Microsoft has started testing Desktop Share in all Insider Channels, included in version 1.25071.125 and higher of the Copilot app. It allows the Copilot AI assistant to see a specific app window or your entire screen, and use it as context for questions. For example, you could have a picture of a scenic landscape in a social media post on your screen, and ask Copilot to identify the image without copying and pasting it into a chat window.
The company said in a blog post, “It can help analyze content, provide insights, and answer your questions, coaching you through it aloud. Get tips on making improvements to your creative project, help with improving your resume, or guidance while navigating a new game.”
you may access it by clicking the glasses icon in the Copilot window, both in regular mode and voice mode. This doesn’t seem to require a Copilot+ PC with a NPU—it’s probably using cloud models, just like normal text and voice conversations.
Other Changes
Here are some of the smaller updates across Insider builds in the past week:
