The addition of a Copilot key is part of Microsoft’s “year of the AI PC”
Microsoft $MSFT has unveiled a new upgrade to its PCs—one that lets you summon its AI chatbot with the literal push of a button. Today the tech giant announced that upcoming Windows keyboards will feature a Copilot key, which calls up access to Microsoft’s AI-powered assistant, starting this month.
Microsoft’s new Copilot key brings the first big change to the Windows keyboard since the addition of the Start menu key in 1994. The AI assistant key will replace the menu button, sitting next to the alt key on the left and the left arrow button on the right on most keyboards.
The new Copilot key marks how Microsoft, which has been one of the leading players in the AI industry, is pushing hard for the adoption of its AI chatbots in a user’s day-to-day. Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s consumer chief marketing officer, wrote that 2024 is “the year of the AI PC” in a blog post about the keyboard update.
When pressed, the new key will activate a desktop Copilot, which allows users to type or speak out loud commands to adjust their PCs’ settings with prompts like “change to dark mode” or to take actions like creating illustrations or retrieving information from the web faster.
With a growing list of big tech companies and upstarts like Anthropic and OpenAI launching AI products, Microsoft will need to find a way to stay ahead of the competition. Adding an AI key to the keyboard could compel users to pull up Microsoft’s chatbot rather than heading to a competitor’s site. The key’s placement is a more in-your-face way to attract more users to use Microsoft’s Copilot, priced at $30 per user per month.
Last year, Microsoft announced a slew of AI-related products, first with its new AI-powered Bing Search engine to fulfill more complex search queries last January (although the move didn’t make much of a dent in Google $GOOGL search’s market share). Shortly after, the tech giant announced a number of AI chatbots—or Copilots—across Office apps like Word and Outlook to help summarize meetings or draft emails. On a conference call with analysts and investors in October, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company has more than 1 million paid Copilot users.
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