Snapdragon X Copilot+ PC: AI experiences in the box

With Copilot+ PC, Microsoft shifts the marketing of Windows 11 on Arm from efficiency and uptime to AI. I think that’s a mistake: this platform offers a unique combination of performance, efficiency, and battery life in thin and light laptops, which greatly undermines the long-standing advantages of the Apple Silicon-based MacBook Air. In fact, the AI ​​experiences that come with Copilot+ PCs are disappointing and don’t provide a reason to spend $1,000 or more on a new laptop.

This is especially true now that the only truly compelling Copilot+ PC AI experience, Recall, was literally removed from the product at the last minute: Recall would have used several small language models (SLMs) pre-installed on Copilot+ PCs like the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14 Gen 9 I am now reviewing to provide a comprehensive solution for finding documents, websites and other information 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 Copilot+ PC buyer should risk participating in, and then be made available in preview later this year.

Until then, the chances of AI are, so to speak, slim.

Copilot+ PCs ship with the first version of Windows 11 version 24H2, which anyone can now upgrade to if they wish, and which offers some nice updates compared to its predecessors. But Copilot+ PCs differentiate themselves – or at least try to – from other 24H2-based PCs by offering a small range of AI experiences that leverage the Snapdragon .

This won’t last long.

Auto super resolution (Auto SR)

Auto SR (Super Resolution) upscales video games in real time, and is unique to Copilot+ PCs. I have experienced this while playing two games so far, Fate (2016) and Check, as noted in Snapdragon X Copilot+ PC: Gaming on the Go. As far as I can tell, you can run emulated x64 games at lower resolutions, which improves performance and frame rate, while using AI to improve visual quality so that the game appears to be running at a higher resolution.

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

I *have *learned one thing since my first Auto SR experience: you can configure it on the fly for specific games, and that’s why my Fate experience was so good. There’s an interface in Settings > System > Display > Graphics where you can specify your GPU preference, enable and disable Auto SR, and optimize on a game-by-game basis for windowed play.

In other words, if you’re not getting the performance and visual quality you want, find the game and enable “Automatic super-resolution.” It might just work and make an unplayable game playable.

Co-creator in Paint

If you’re familiar with the AI ​​features Microsoft added to Paint in the past year (Remove Background and Image Creator, both of which are great), then Cocreator will some feel. The difference of course is that the previous two features do not require or even use the NPU, while Cocreator does. So you will not see a Cocreator option in Paint’s pseudo-ribbon unless you have a Copilot+ PC.

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

But I’m working from a laptop here, so I created 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 past Earth on the bottom.” And before I could tap Enter, it started generating an image. That was pretty terrible.

You can change the style to watercolor, oil painting, ink sketch, anime or pixel art. And there is a creativity slider whose use is not clear. So I looked it up: “Lower creativity means less AI input and the output will be closer to your sketch. Higher creativity means more AI input and the output will be more imaginative and diverse.” Sure enough, switching to 95 on the slider made a nice difference.

But the picture was still not good. That made me wonder if this tool could be used to take a high quality image and turn it into a riff. So I opened an image that Copilot had previously created for me. And I added a prompt to see what would happen. Okay, that’s interesting. And turning the Creativity slider up and down made a difference.

But I am not sure How This is useful: I use Copilot’s image creation feature (Designer) every day and really like it. This seems more… random. And a lot less useful.

Image maker in Photos

As with Paint, anyone with Windows 11 has access to a handful of (non-NPU) features in the Photos app, such as Generative Erase and Background Blur, Delete and Replace.

With a Copilot+ PC you get a few more AI features, and these features use the PC’s NPU. (Again, just like with Paint.)

The first is another Image Creator, but this one has 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 of lower quality and (much) smaller resolution (512 x 512 pixels) than what we get over the cloud with Copilot/Designer, and for some reason are limited to a square aspect ratio. But where Copilot/Designer creates four images at each prompt, Image Creator in Photos creates many images, and you can keep the creations going by scrolling through the list of thumbnails.

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

I like that there is a creativity slider, like in Cocreate in Paint, and style choices. I also like that you can create variations on a selected image. But this feature is a non-starter: it doesn’t do what you ask, and the quality is too low to be useful.

There is also an image restyle feature in addition to Background Blur, Delete and Replace. It uses AI face detection capabilities to analyze a photo and reformat 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: Selecting Impressionist turned the background of a photo of my wife into a high-quality painting, but left my wife in her original photographic style. That said, I like that it shows you the prompt that each choice generates.

And the suddenly common Creativity slider is there to exaggerate this effect. I would prefer it to style the entire photo, including my wife. And it turns out that under the creativity slide there is a dropdown that allows you to configure which parts of the photo are affected. By default this is ‘Background Only’, but there are also options for ‘Reformat All’ and ‘Foreground Only’. Unfortunately, but perhaps understandably, Microsoft does not allow Restyle Image to restyle (or, as it says, “distort”) human faces.

So I tried this feature with a few photos that don’t have people in them. A plate of fried eggs, for example.

And a sunset. Both very nice.

This might literally be the best unique AI feature you get with a Copilot+ PC. For now…

Live subtitles with real-time language translation

Live Captions is one of the best features in Windows 11. And because it works with any app that outputs audio, you can use it for online meetings regardless of the service, or with apps like YouTube.

With a Copilot+ PC, Live Captions adds support for real-time translations to English from more than 40 languages. (I assume it will eventually support two-way translations in all supported languages.) My testing options here are limited: I’m only fluent in English, but I know a little bit of Spanish, so I looked for a Spanish-language video. understand it well enough to test how well the live translation feature works.

Pretty good, it seems. A Spanish language learning video was about the right speed and I could tell the translation was quite good. I’d like to test this more, but we’re limited by my limitations here. And it should support more languages.

Windows Studio effects with creative filters

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

I’m on camera a lot thanks to the various podcasts I participate in, and while I see the appeal of some of these tools, the sad reality is that I can’t use them. But there are nice things in there. Auto framing and portrait lighting are quite simple. And eye contact is as creepy as ever, although it offers two sub-choices on the Yoga, Standard and Teleprompter, which I hadn’t seen before.

Background effects work as usual, with the Standard Blur and Portrait Blur options. But I had never seen creative filters before and they are nice. You are given three choices: Illustrated, Watercolor and Animated.

And they all run directly from the NPU, which is important: otherwise they would destroy your CPU or GPU, reducing battery life.

Key learning points

Clearly, Microsoft was counting on Recall to make a big splash with Copilot+ PC, as the remaining NPU-powered AI experiences are a mixed bag of mostly American English-language tools spread across a handful of in-box apps. Some are great, like Image Restyle in Photos. But most feel half-hearted, 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 operating system, but what you get with the third-party apps you install on Windows. That is, no one uses Windows for Windows, we use Windows for the apps.

Again, the selection of NPU-powered experiences is light, and heavily focused on video editors, photo editors, and maker-type apps. Of course it is.

But that’s a topic for another day: hopefully there’ll be more to choose from by the time I get around to it.