Microsoft typically releases updates in the fall, but a July refresh of Windows will add new AI experiences, the company said on Tuesday.
Most of these new features should be familiar, though only from testing; they’ve made their way through the Windows Insider beta program and now on your PC. Some require the NPU power of a Copilot+ PC.
Microsoft began teasing new Windows 11 features in April, with new Settings cards and tweaks to Voice Access. Now, you’ll start seeing the first vestiges of semantic and agentic search within the Settings menu, plus updates to Click-to-Do, and more.
Microsoft has flirted with semantic search before, though the company has doubled up with testing semantic search at both the file level as well as within Settings. (Semantic search just means that a user can describe what they’re looking for using natural language, as opposed to specifying a certain keyword.) For July, Microsoft is just saying that semantic search will apply to the Windows 11 Settings menu.
This update goes a bit further, however. Microsoft is saying that there’s an agent built into the Settings menu now, too. In other words, you’ll be able to ask Settings to perform a task, such as changing a display resolution. If Windows can, it will perform the task for you (using an agent). If it can’t, Microsoft is promising that it will point you in the right direction and let you do it instead.
The new Settings search feature requires a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor; the capability will arrive on Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 or AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 processors soon.
This update also releases new features that were in testing as recently as two weeks ago: Click-to-Do, which now adds integrations with Copilot as well as an app called Reading Coach.
Click-to-Do allows you to right-click a location or block of text and provides context-aware actions. In this case, Windows could offer to take a block of text and read it aloud via an immersive reader, practice with it in Reading Coach, or work with it in Copilot to generate a draft.
Paint is offering two new upgrades: one rather useless, and the other decidedly not. While you’ll be able to create new AI-generated “stickers” within Paint for use on a Paint image or elsewhere, you’ll also be able to edit a Paint image using a new object select tool.
Though I haven’t tried Object Select, my bet is that it’s repurposed code from Paint3D and Magic Select. Magic Select was one of the better utilities inside Paint 3D, allowing you to quickly remove an object from a scene, much like some of the new smartphone photo editors do as well.
Photos, meanwhile, is officially adding Relight, a tool to add new lighting effects to your photos. That’s just for Snapdragon X PCs, too.
Finally, Microsoft is adding a “perfect screenshot” tool to the Snipping Tool application. Normally, you have the option of dragging and dropping a window around your selected content. You can still do that, but Snipping Tool will use AI to adjust it precisely.
The new change also implements Microsoft’s new Black Screen of Death as well as a fast machine-recovery feature. Microsoft says that compared with Windows 11 22H2, unexpected crashes/restarts have dropped by 22 percent.
