Windows Copilot will soon allow you to edit photos, shop instantly, and more

Ever since its reveal and launch, Microsoft Copilot has been getting a steady stream of features and an upcoming update will add even more. The latest update, detailed in the official Windows blog, will arrive in late March 2024 and will introduce tons of new skills and tools. 

For instance, you'll be able to type commands to activate certain PC features. Simply type something like “enable battery saver” or “turn off battery saver” and Copilot will take the appropriate action and confirm its completion.

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screenshot of Windows Copilot features

(Image credit: Microsoft)
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screenshot of Windows Copilot features

(Image credit: Microsoft)
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screenshot of Windows Copilot features

(Image credit: Microsoft)

There’s also a new Generative Erase feature in the Photos app that allows you to select and remove unwanted objects or imperfections from your images. Copilot will also receive new accessibility features including Voice Shortcuts, which lets you create custom commands using just a single phrase. You can also now use voice commands on a multi-display setup to better navigate between displays or move files and apps.

New plugins are also coming to Copilot, allowing easy access to various applications in an instant. Shopify, Klarna and Kayak will be added in March, adding to the Copilot features offered via OpenTable and Instacart.

Windows Copliot is finally getting there…

Some previous updates to Windows Copilot have given the tool some serious utility. For instance, you can now use it to generate and edit AI images using text-to-image prompts, powered by Dall-E. An update to this tool, Designer, takes it even further by letting you make tweaks to generated content like highlighting certain aspects, blurring the background, or adding a unique filter.

There was also another very useful plugin added to Copilot recently, Power Automate. It lets users automate repetitive and tedious tasks like creating and manipulating entries in Excel, managing PDFs, and other file management.

Slowly Windows Copilot is getting more and more useful, with tons of new features and improvements that make it worth having around. Maybe it will even make Windows 11 a worthwhile upgrade for those who still haven’t taken the plunge yet and are still looking at Windows 10.

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Copilot gets a big redesign and a new way to edit your AI-generated images

It’s been one year since Bing Chat received its generative AI power-up and we’ve seen it change a lot since including a rebranding into Copilot. To celebrate the first anniversary, Microsoft decided to redesign Copilot’s homepage as well as introduce a new editing feature.

The company states when you visit the AI’s engine desktop website, “you will see… a cleaner, sleeker look”. In the middle of the page is a revolving carousel of sample prompts with an accompanying image. Its purpose, according to Microsoft, is to give you an idea of what Copilot is capable of; to get those creative juices flowing. It is certainly more engaging than the previous version. The old page had three sample text prompts next to each other with no indication that it could create images.

Copilot on mobile is receiving an identical update. The app has the same carousel of sample prompts with a picture above to give you some ideas. You also have the option to toggle GPT-4 for better results. Activating it turns the software’s blue accents to purple. 

Tweaking prompts

As for the feature mentioned earlier, it’s called Designer. It allows you to make tweaks to generated content like highlighting certain aspects, blurring the background, or adding a unique filter. As an example, let’s take Copilot’s suggestion of creating an image of an animal wearing a football helmet. Moving your cursor over the picture makes a bold white line appear around an object. Clicking it highlights the portion. 

A couple of options appear at the bottom of the window. We chose to tell Copilot to make the colors pop. After a few seconds, the finished product appears. You can then either undo the effect or keep it. For filters, you have eight to choose from. Pixel art, block print, and claymation are some of the selections. Like the edits before, applying a filter takes a few seconds. 

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Copilot highlighting subject

(Image credit: Future)
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Copilot making colors pop

(Image credit: Future)
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Copilot pixel filter

(Image credit: Future)

Designer is free for everyone to try out. However, subscribers to Copilot Pro will be given extra tools. They can resize generated content and regenerate images into either a square or landscape orientation. Microsoft says it eventually roll out a “Designer GPT” to Copilot. The company calls it a canvas of sorts where people can “visualize [their] ideas.” If we had to take a guess, it could be a publicly available GPT model that you can use to create editing tools. OpenAI offers a similar service with its online store. We reached out to Microsoft for more details. This story will be updated at a later time.

Check out TechRadar's list of the best free drawing software for 2024 if you'd like to find a way to make the edits yourself.

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WhatsApp now lets you edit your messaging nightmares – here’s how to do it

WhatsApp is saving you from those awkward spelling mistakes and missing commas by giving you the power to edit messages – within limits. 

We first saw inklings of this update in a late March beta. The feature didn’t work at the time, but there were some clues hinting at how it would function. From the looks of things, not much has changed since then.

To fix a text, Meta states you need to first long-press a sent message and then select Edit from the menu that appears. Users have 15 minutes to make their corrections. Texts cannot be changed past the time limit, forcing you to live with the typos you made (or you can just send a new text).

Messages that have been altered will display ‘Edited’ right next to them, making it clear to others in a chat that some corrections have been made. It all works similarly to iMessage editing on iOS 16. WhatsApp, however, will not save any sort of edit history, meaning others won’t be able to see previous versions of texts.

Editable messages are currently “rolling out to users globally and will be available to everyone in the coming weeks” so keep an eye out for the new patch. We asked Meta if there are any other restrictions. For example, on iOS 16 users can only make up to five edits to a text within a 15-minute window. This story will be updated at a later time.

WhatsApp Message Editing

WhatsApp Message Editing (Image credit: WhatsApp)

A very busy month

WhatsApp has had quite a busy month as the platform has seen multiple updates in a short amount of time. Just last week, the app gained a Chat Lock tool, ensuring your private conversation stays private which can be useful if you’re using a shared phone. Before that, we saw the introduction of single-vote polls “to stop people from skewing [results] with multiple votes.”

As for the near future, it appears Meta will soon launch a “password reminder feature for end-to-end encrypted backups”, according to a recent post from WABetaInfo. The app will ask you to verify the password so you’ll always have access to the backup in the event you forget your login credentials. This particular update will be rolling out to both Android and iOS “over the coming weeks.”

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Adobe Premiere Pro update lets you edit videos like it’s a word doc

Adobe’s latest update to Premiere Pro promises to be an absolute game-changer for video editors with the arrival of text-based video editing. 

According to the company, the feature, first trailed in April 2023, is “an entirely new way of creating rough cuts that are as simple as copying and pasting text.” That means it doesn’t change how videos are produced – it alters who can edit videos. 

Text-based editing isn’t the only new feature now available in one of the best video editing software tools on the market. In a bid to maximize workflows, Adobe has unveiled Background Auto Save, smoother scrolling, and improved language support, too.  

Ctrl + V(ideo) 

Editing videos through text is all about streamlining and simplicity. This is, after all, about making it easier to stitch together rough cuts before fine-tuning. 

Once source footage is transcribed, users can quickly highlight the required text from the transcript and insert it into the timeline. Using the sequence transcript, editors can then copy and paste text to move clips, or delete it to bin them, before refining the cut using Premiere Pro’s trimming tools. 

It’s not the first time Adobe has toyed with text-based video editing. Last year, the company unveiled its Project Blink beta, an AI-powered video editor for browsers, that works in a suspiciously similar manner.

When we reviewed the web-based video editing app, we were impressed  by its overall accessibility. Anyone who’s ever used Microsoft Word or similar will find themselves in somewhat familiar territory. At the time, we said, “it’s fair to say you lack the omniscient control that you’d find in other video editors, and this isn’t exactly an Adobe Premiere Pro alternative. But what would usually take hours in a fully-fledged video editor, Adobe's Project Blink can accomplish in minutes.” 

Adding text-based video editing in Premiere Pro takes that to another level. It not only gives just about everyone the ability to build a rough cut, but makes it an integral part of the workflow for experienced and professional video editors. 

And, like the proliferation of machine-learning neural filters and the ability to  remove objects from an image in one click Photoshop, it’s another example of Adobe simplifying creative processes. We’re all content creators now.  

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It’s finally happening – Twitter is working on an edit button, but is this a good thing?

If you've been wishing to edit those tweets with spelling mistakes without having to delete them, Twitter has announced that it's working on an edit feature.

This feature request has become a meme in itself, with many users asking for this for years. If you use Twitter, you've most likely been in a situation where you've posted a tweet from the previous evening, and you notice that there's a missing letter or a missing comma that skews what you were trying to convey.

Twitter has confirmed that the feature will first arrive as a test for Twitter Blue users, which is its subscription service that brings benefits such as undoing a sent tweet after a short amount of time.

But while this sounds like good news for many, it may be an example of being careful what you wish for.


Analysis: This may hinder rather than help users

Other social platforms have had this feature for years. If you posted something on Facebook for example and it's missing a word, you can quickly edit the post and add the word back in.

Instagram and Tiktok also have similar features, but for Twitter, it's not as simple as adding an edit button.

Many users have wanted an easy method to edit a tweet without deleting it, especially if it's about a topic that's long since finished for example. But Twitter has a slippery slope with this, as many use the platform as a news feed and as a way of conversing with followers on certain subjects. Editing these tweets could make your input worse.

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But there are other dangers to this feature if it's not implemented right. Twitter's Head of Consumer Product, Jay Sullivan, rightly said during the announcement, that editing a tweet could alter a topic of conversation that could be sensitive to many, and could construe different meanings.

Editing tweets is not something that I've wanted Twitter to focus on – it's rather a bigger focus on curtailing abuse and spam accounts that have been more prevalent since the pandemic began in 2020.

But this feature could stay as a test, or as an exclusive feature of Twitter Blue. However, the announcement has excited many, so it now depends on whether the feature measures up to the wishes of its users, or if it's used to alter conversations for the worse.

Regardless of what happens, Twitter clearly has another challenge on its hands now that editing tweets are finally official.

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More

It’s finally happening – Twitter is working on an edit button, but is this a good thing?

If you've been wishing to edit those tweets with spelling mistakes without having to delete them, Twitter has announced that it's working on an edit feature.

This feature request has become a meme in itself, with many users asking for this for years. If you use Twitter, you've most likely been in a situation where you've posted a tweet from the previous evening, and you notice that there's a missing letter or a missing comma that skews what you were trying to convey.

Twitter has confirmed that the feature will first arrive as a test for Twitter Blue users, which is its subscription service that brings benefits such as undoing a sent tweet after a short amount of time.

But while this sounds like good news for many, it may be an example of being careful what you wish for.


Analysis: This may hinder rather than help users

Other social platforms have had this feature for years. If you posted something on Facebook for example and it's missing a word, you can quickly edit the post and add the word back in.

Instagram and Tiktok also have similar features, but for Twitter, it's not as simple as adding an edit button.

Many users have wanted an easy method to edit a tweet without deleting it, especially if it's about a topic that's long since finished for example. But Twitter has a slippery slope with this, as many use the platform as a news feed and as a way of conversing with followers on certain subjects. Editing these tweets could make your input worse.

See more

But there are other dangers to this feature if it's not implemented right. Twitter's Head of Consumer Product, Jay Sullivan, rightly said during the announcement, that editing a tweet could alter a topic of conversation that could be sensitive to many, and could construe different meanings.

Editing tweets is not something that I've wanted Twitter to focus on – it's rather a bigger focus on curtailing abuse and spam accounts that have been more prevalent since the pandemic began in 2020.

But this feature could stay as a test, or as an exclusive feature of Twitter Blue. However, the announcement has excited many, so it now depends on whether the feature measures up to the wishes of its users, or if it's used to alter conversations for the worse.

Regardless of what happens, Twitter clearly has another challenge on its hands now that editing tweets are finally official.

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More