I’m in love with an ultra-specific Windows Copilot+ feature

I don’t use a Windows Copilot+ PC as a daily driver, though I have several in my office. But there’s one absolutely critical Copilot+ feature that forces me to swap out my current laptop, attach a Copilot+ PC to my docking station, and boot it up.

Very few people have bought a Copilot+ PC in the last year. So these features, which are currently locked to Copilot+ PCs and their NPU, aren’t well known: Windows Recall; Paint’s Cocreator, Generative Erase, Object Select, and Sticker Generator; Click-to-Do; Photos’ Super Resolution, Relight and Restyle Image; the intelligent search features within the Settings menu; Windows Studio Effects; and Live Captions.

My editor assumed I would prefer the last feature, Live Captions, probably because it’s both useful and cool. But no! I actually have one Copilot+ feature I frequently use instead: Image Resizer, now called Super Resolution.

What are these Copilot+ features, anyway?

Our explainer on what a Copilot+ PC is focused on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processor and laptops that can use it. Certain Intel Core Ultra (Lunar Lake) and AMD Ryzen AI 300 laptops now qualify, too. They all depend on the power of an NPU, the AI engine at the heart of these chips.

Microsoft, in turn, uses the NPU to power some of its AI features that have arrived on Windows PCs with an NPU installed. Here’s a brief list of those features that I explained above, and you can use the link for a deeper dive. Note that these are features that require an NPU, and you won’t receive them if you don’t own a Copilot+ PC.

• Windows Recall: Microsoft’s handy but controversial tool that snapshots your PC to help you find misplaced bits of information
• Paint’s Cocreator: An art tool that generates art in near-real time as you sketch, preserving the layout of your drawing.
• Click-To-Do: Think of this as an intelligent right-click menu, that uses AI to guess what you want to do.
• Windows Photos’ Restyle Image: If you want to turn a photo into a mosaic or a Monet, you can ask Photos’ AI to do that for you.
• Windows Studio Effects: A collection of tools to blur your background, filter out noise, and help you look like you’re paying attention.
• Live Captions: This provides AI-based captioning and translation of pre-recorded and streamed video.
• Photos’ Image Relight: a subtle editing tool to provide additional lighting effects.
• Microsoft is also testing semantic search, both for files as well as the Settings menu. The latter is now live.

Why do I love Super Resolution?

For every story we write, we need to have art to accompany it. If you’re reviewing a laptop, your work is practically done for you. We need an illustration that meets certain image size guidelines, and sometimes that means working with a very small icon — for example, the Microsoft Store icon on your taskbar, or the Copilot icon. Sometimes, you can’t find an image that’s large enough.

If you choose to edit a photo within the Windows Photos app, you can turn on Super Resolution. Here, you can choose to upscale a photo to a larger resolution, and Windows performs some AI editing effects to try and smooth out any graininess. Here, I’ve taken the tiny OneDrive icon on my Windows taskbar and increased the resolution. A slider bar demonstrates the differences.

Super Resolution is the perfect tool for the job. I can take a small image and simply enlarge it within Paint, but a tiny icon can look blurry and indistinct when enlarged. The image resizing tool works very well for enlarging and sharpening an image, so that it looks pretty good. And, of course, it’s free.

Of course, you can use Super Resolution for something like a scanned photo, or something else. It’s not a tool you’ll need to dig out frequently, but it’s very helpful for me when I need it. It’s not a miracle worker, and there are paid services like Topaz.ai that promise to do a better job. But again: Super Resolution is free, convenient, and right on my laptop.

Why don’t I use Live Captions? I don’t watch that much video, basically. I’ll watch foreign TV (my wife is a K-drama fan on Netflix) and I’ll read foreign reporting. I don’t often find myself watching foreign TikToks or other video, and many of those platforms already have built-in translation, anyway. I’m also never sure if Live Captions is giving me the correct translation.

Live Captions is still pretty magical — it’s easy to take it for granted, but it’s something from Star Trek come to life. But it’s the little things that matter in my daily work, and Image Resizer fill the bill.

A bonus feature for you: Generative Erase

One of the issues with Microsoft’s latest AI blitz is that some functions demand an NPU, while others don’t — and there’s no messaging to that effect. It’s chaotic. I do really enjoy how Microsoft has quietly taken some of the better features in apps like Photoshop and brought them inside Windows, such as layers in the Paint app.

For ages, Photos also had a tool called Spot Fix, a very early use of AI for photo editing. I don’t like to heavily edit photos, only because we often have a journalistic responsibility to show things as they are. If a laptop attracts fingerprints, it’s sometimes useful to show that. In certain cases, I’d use Spot Tool to edit out a speck of dust, a spot on a background wall, or occasionally an object. In the latter case, that’s usually because I was trying to take a photo of a device at a trade show, and something distracting intruded.

Spot Fill would erase dust very easily. Generative Erase is like an improved version of it. There is a Generative Erase function inside both Photos and Paint, and neither require an NPU. I know smartphones now provide photo editing right in the phone itself, but Generative Erase is handy for stored photos in OneDrive or elsewhere.

Microsoft is also testing Generative Fill within Paint, which will add objects to your image — so you could add a guy in a gorilla suit to your wedding photo, or something. Generative Fill, however, will require an NPU / Copilot+ PC. Simply keeping track of what AI features are available and what hardware they require is a challenge for everyone right now!