Windows 11 may soon support artificial intelligence (AI) features, as Microsoft is said to be working on adding automation and AI support to its popular desktop operating system and other products. its related products. The Redmond-based software company’s Windows 11 operating system comes with Photos and Paint apps for image viewing and basic manipulation, respectively. According to a report, these apps could soon support features like optical character recognition (OCR) and rapid image generation using synthetic AI.
According to a Windows Central report, citing unnamed sources, Microsoft is working on adding AI functionality to three apps: Photos, Camera, Paint, and a snipping tool used to take screenshots. These apps are available immediately on Windows 11, and new functionality can be added through app updates on the Microsoft Store or through the company’s regular operating system feature updates. The company is looking at the possibility of adding generalized AI support to the Microsoft Paint app, which would allow the basic image manipulation tool to create images using prompts to quickly and edit them. app. Microsoft previously introduced support for building images with user-supplied prompts on the enhanced AI-powered Bing app, as well as OpenAI’s DALL-E text-to-image model.
Meanwhile, the Photos app, the default app used to open images on Windows 11, as well as the Snipping tool, can all benefit from an existing feature on smartphones: OCR support. . This is a feature that could be useful to millions of users and will eliminate the need to use online services that provide similar functionality. The report also contains an image of an internal version of the Camera app with OCR support to detect text from a photo on a page. It’s unclear if Microsoft will roll out these features to Windows users, and when some of these features may require specialized hardware for neural computing to work reliably. Windows 11 is expected to get a major software upgrade next year, when more AI features can be built into the operating system. However, according to the report, some of these features are still in the “beta” stage, meaning it may take some time before they are rolled out to users.