Snapdragon X Copilot+ PC: In-Box AI Experiences

With Copilot+ PC, Microsoft is shifting the marketing of Windows 11 on Arm from efficiency and operability to AI. I think that’s a mistake: The platform offers a unique combination of performance, efficiency and battery life in a thin and light notebook that goes a long way to undermining the years-old advantages of the Apple Silicon-based MacBook Air. More specifically, the AI ​​experiences that come with Copilot+ computers are stunning and provide no reason to spend $1,000 or more on a new laptop.

This is especially true now that the only really impressive Copilot+ PC AI experience, Recall, was literally removed from the product at the last minute: Recall would use several small language models (SLMs) pre-installed on Copilot+ PCs such as the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14 Gen 9, which I will now review, provides a comprehensive solution for searching documents, web pages and other information that you have worked with in the past. But now we have to wait: Recall will first be made available for testing through the Windows Insider Program, which no buyer of Copilot+ PCs should risk participating in, before being made available in preview later this year.

Until then, AI pickings are pretty much slim.

Copilot+ PCs come with an initial build of Windows 11 version 24H2, which anyone can upgrade to now if they wish, and which provides some neat updates compared to its predecessors. However, the Copilot+ PCs set themselves apart – or at least try to – from other 24H2-based PCs by offering a small range of AI experiences that take advantage of Snapdragon X’s powerful Neural Processing Unit (NPU) and a claimed 40+ pre-installed SMLs.

It will not take long.

Automatic Super Resolution (Auto SR)

Auto SR (Super Resolution) upscales video game resolution in real time and is unique to Copilot+ computers. I’ve experienced this in two games so far, Fate (2016) and Management, as featured in Snapdragon X Copilot+ PC: Gaming on the Go. From what I can tell, it allows you to run emulated x64 games at lower resolutions, which improves performance and framerate, while using AI to improve the visual quality so the game appears to be running at a higher resolution.

When it works, it works well: I spent about two hours playing it Fate yesterday after and was really impressed with the smooth performance and visual quality. But like many Copilot+ PC features, there are limitations: Auto SR only works with games, though it seems the technology could benefit video playback as well. And only for select games, about 100 during this launch period. And it requires a lot of fluffing.

From my first experience with Auto SR, I *learned* one thing: You can configure it on the fly for specific games, and therefore Fate the experience was so good. Under Settings > System > Display > Graphics is an interface where you can specify GPU preference, toggle Auto SR, and optimize for windowed play for individual games.

In other words, if you’re not getting the performance and visual quality you want, find the game and enable “Auto Super Resolution”. It might just be enough to make an unplayable game playable.

Co-creator in Painting

If you’re familiar with the AI ​​features Microsoft has added to Paint over the past year – Remove Background and Image Creator, both of which are great – then Cocreator some meaning. The difference, of course, is that the previous two functions do not require or even use the NPU, where Cocreator does. So if you don’t have a Copilot+ computer, you won’t see the Cocreator option in the Paint pseudo ribbon.

Cocreator allows you to insert a text prompt (like Image Creator and optimized for English for now) and/or a drawing of your own creation – I think it could be done with a stylus on a 2-in-1 tablet – and then it uses both as a source for a more professional-looking creation. I’ve seen Microsoft and Qualcomm deliver the same demo of this feature a couple of times, where they make a finger painting image of a turtle and then Cocreator turns it into, um, a better image of a turtle.

But I’m working here with a laptop, so I made a simple image of the earth with some stars and the moon. You know, like a kid. And then I added the prompt “Add a spaceship flying over the ground at the bottom”. And before I could hit enter, it started generating an image. Which was pretty scary.

You can change the style to watercolor, oil painting, ink sketch, anime or pixel art. And there’s a Creativity slider, the use of which is unclear. So I looked it up: “Lower creativity means less AI input and the output will be closer to your sketch. More creativity means more AI input, and the output will be more imaginative and diverse.” And sure enough, switching to 95 on the slider made a nice difference.

But the picture was still off. This made me wonder if this tool could be used to take a high quality image and riff. So I opened the image that Copilot had created for me earlier. And I added a challenge to see what happens. Okay, that’s interesting. And dialing the Creativity slider up and down made all the difference.

But I’m not sure how here’s what’s helpful: I use Copilot (Designer) image creation every day and I really like it. It seems more…random. And much less useful.

Image Creator in Photos

As with Paint, anyone with Windows 11 can access several features (non-NPU) in the Photos app, such as generative background erase and blur, delete and replace.

With the Copilot+ computer, you get several additional AI features, and these features use the computer’s NPU. (Again, as with Painting.)

The first is another Image Creator, but this one comes with a twist: Instead of hitting the cloud and costing Microsoft a few cents each time, it uses the NPU to access local SLMs. The resulting images are lower quality and (much) lower resolution (512 x 512 pixels) than what we get through the cloud with Copilot/Designer, and are limited to a square aspect ratio for some reason. But where Copilot/Designer creates four images with each challenge, Image Creator in Photos creates many images and you can continue your creations by scrolling through the thumbnail list.

To test this feature, I used a prompt I used earlier in the Copilot/Designer app: “A small, rotten apple with a bite taken out of it, on the edge of a huge market of fresh fruits and vegetables of all kinds, with a light shining on it from above .” And… yes. Not even close.

I like that there’s a Creativity slider, like Cocreate in Painting, and a style picker. I also like that you can create variations of the selected image. But this feature is non-starter: it doesn’t do what you want, and the quality is too low to be useful.

Besides Blur Background, Remove and Replace, there is also Change Image Style. It uses AI facial detection capabilities to analyze a photo and restyle it using a text prompt or one of several style options such as Fantasy, Anime, Surrealism, Impressionist and more.

The results are interesting, but not what I expected: Impressionist selection turned the background of my wife’s photo into a high-quality image, but left my wife in her original photo style. That said, I like that it shows you the challenge each choice generates.

And suddenly there’s a regular Creativity slider that exaggerates this effect. I’d rather it styled the whole photo, including my wife. And as it turns out, there’s a drop-down menu under the Creativity image that lets you configure which parts of the photo will be affected. The default setting is “Background Only”, but there are also “Change All” and “Foreground Only” options. It’s sad, but perhaps understandable, that Microsoft doesn’t allow Restyle Image to restyle—or as it puts it, “deform”—human faces.

That being said, I tested this feature with a few photos that don’t contain any people. For example, a plate of fried eggs.

And the sunset. Both very nice.

This may literally be the best single AI feature you get with a Copilot+ computer. For now…

Live subtitles with real-time language translation

Live Transcripts are one of the best features in Windows 11. And because they work with any app that produces audio, you can use them for online meetings regardless of the service or with apps like YouTube.

With PC Copilot+, Live Captions adds real-time English translation support from over 40 languages. (I assume it will eventually support two-way translation across all supported languages.) My testing options are limited here: I’m only fluent in English, but I can speak a little Spanish, so I looked for a video in Spanish that I’d like to understand well enough for you to test , how well the live translation feature works.

Pretty good, it seems. The Spanish learning video was at the right speed and I could see that the translation was quite good. I’d like to test it more, but we’re limited here by my, um, limitations. And it needs to support more languages.

Windows Studio effects with creative filters

In my recent review of the HP ZBook Firefly 14 G11, I noted that it supports Windows Studio effects, thanks to its NPU, but not all effects. However, with the Copilot+ computer and its more powerful NPU, you get a complete meal plan.

I’m in front of the camera a lot thanks to the various podcasts I’m a part of, and while I can see the appeal of some of these tools, the sad reality is that I can’t use any of them. But there are nice things. Auto Framing and Portrait Light are pretty straightforward. And Eye contact is as creepy as ever, though it offers two sub-choices on Yoga, Standard and Teleprompter, which I haven’t seen before.

Background effects work as usual, with Standard Blur and Portrait Blur options. But I’ve never seen creative filters before and they’re fun. You have three options: Illustrated, Watercolor and Animated.

And they all work directly on the NPU, which is important: Otherwise, they’d mess up your CPU or GPU and kill battery life.

Key things

It’s clear that Microsoft was counting on Recall to make a big splash with Copilot+ PC, as the rest of the NPU-based AI is a hodgepodge of mostly US English tools scattered across a handful of apps in the box. Some are great, like Restyle Image in Photos. But most feel half-baked, or at least not fully implemented.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, the real value of Windows 11, as always, isn’t what you get with the OS, but what you get with the third-party apps you install on Windows. This means that no one uses Windows for Windows, we use Windows for applications.

Here too, the selection of NPU-powered experiences is light and heavily skewed toward video editors, photo editors, and creator-type apps. Of course it is.

But that’s a topic for another day: Hopefully when I get around to it, there will be plenty to choose from.