Copilot is the center of the AI-driven push as Microsoft gets ready to release a major Windows 11 update later this year. Though most people’s attention is on the arrival of that assistant-like trait, under the hood, there is something more subdued and transforming happening. Microsoft is also using artificial intelligence to improve the daily apps included with Windows—apps including Photos, Snipping Tool, Camera, and Paint. These are not all-encompassing transformations. Rather, they are sensible, significant enhancements meant to make the features you now use more intelligent, effective, and capable.

A Windows Central analysis claims that Microsoft is now testing several AI-powered capabilities for inclusion into the main Windows 11 apps. Among the main additions under consideration is optical character recognition (OCR). Users could thus extract text from images taken with the Camera app, Snipping Tool, or Photos. Bid farewell to painstakingly retyping scanned documents, screenshots, signs, or data. Rather, you could be able to just underline the text inside an image and then copy it exactly into a document, email, or browser.

In the tech industry, this is not a novel concept; Apple has been providing comparable capability on its products using the Live Text function for some time. For the millions of Windows users who depend on built-in tools and have not had access to this kind of flawless functionality, it is a welcome addition, though. Especially for students, office workers, and remote teams continuously juggling images and text, OCR coming to Windows makes the experience simpler and effective.

Still, the improvements go beyond text. Features allowing the Photos app to identify objects, people, and animals in an image are another Microsoft test tool. This awareness will help one easily separate a subject from the rest of the picture or isolate backgrounds for editing. Premium image-editing programs already feature these tools as usual fare. Bringing them to native Windows apps could democratize visual editing for consumers without access to—or enthusiasm for—more sophisticated programs like Photoshop.

Microsoft Paint is about to undergo an unexpected change as well. Long thought of as a basic tool, the app is used for quick sketches, basic design, or childhood nostalgia. Microsoft is allegedly trying to incorporate generative artificial intelligence into Paint, though, so enabling users to type a sentence or phrase and have the app create an image based on that text. Already present in Bing Image Creator, this type of text-to-image creation depends on DALL·E technology from OpenAI. Should Paint acquire this ability, it will provide casual users, students, and everyone else interested in artificial intelligence art with fresh, creative opportunities.

Naturally, all of these AI-powered capabilities will depend on appropriate hardware to operate as intended, and this is where Neural Processing Units (NPUs) find application. Designed to speed up AI tasks, NPUs are specialized computers. They have only lately been discovered, mostly in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips, which run some Windows-on-Arm devices. But both Intel and AMD are moving to bring NPUs into the mainstream. Built-in NPUs in AMD’s 7040-series chips and Intel’s forthcoming Meteor Lake CPUs could enable more generally available advanced AI features for regular x86 PC users.

Many of these capabilities allow for local rather than cloud running, depending on an NPU. Regarding privacy, speed, and battery life, that’s a huge win. Your computer will be able to manage these chores on-device rather than forwarding your data to far-off servers for processing. This shift positions Microsoft as a leader in local artificial intelligence computing and fits mounting worries about data privacy and cloud dependency.

Right now, Windows 11 just makes use of NPUs for a few functions, including background blur on video calls. However, the forthcoming improvements point to a more general approach to include artificial intelligence into the running system. Microsoft is not staging a show of these developments, which is unusual. Rather, they are silently slipping them into the programs you already run. Just useful, time-saving capabilities right where you would expect them to be; there is no flashy interface or steep learning curve.

This is not artificial intelligence meant to astound you with futuristic bells and whistles. AI respects your workflow, simplifies your chores, and makes your PC seem somewhat more intelligent. Windows 11 might become the most AI-capable version of Windows yet as the rollout goes on and hardware catches up, not because it transforms everything but rather because it alters the small details that most matter.