45
votes
Microsoft is adding a new key to PC keyboards for the first time since 1994. The Copilot key will eventually be required in new PC keyboards, though not yet.
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- Authors
- Andrew Cunningham
- Published
- Jan 4 2024
- Word count
- 549 words
Another digital assistant? Microsoft, let it go.
Alternate headline: Microsoft Wants to Replicate the Visionary Stupidity of Samsung's Bixby Button.
I want to agree with you because Bixby was garbage and I hate Microsoft. But I find myself going to copilot.microsoft.com more than Google these days. Having generative AI will be the future of all operating systems, but I really hope that it is not vendor locked in on purchase of any device the way that Microsoft is pushing this way. Presently Microsoft doesn't technically own anything related to the parent of OpenAi and I hope that means we will see continued improvements outside of the mainstream vendor sphere. I think Google having the assistant button makes sense, and I can see value in having a generative text pop up on any operating system moving forward I just hope that we don't get stuck with Microsoft being in control of our operating systems for the next 600 years.
Maybe I'm too set in my ways, have trust issues, or lack imagination, but every time I see people suggest LLM's as an alternative to Google I get confused. I do use chat GPT and copilot pretty frequently, but not for the same kinds of questions I would have asked Google. What kinds of things are you asking copilot that you would have asked Google in the past?
This morning I asked ChatGPT how to pronounce a name. Better than me guessing, I suppose. I had someone else confirm the pronunciation and ChatGPT had gotten it perfectly.
Do you use other AI chats? I hadn’t realized Microsoft had a website for this.
so... another modifier key for linux, cool.
Behold, Super... 2!
You joke, but Emacs users might actually appreciate having a Hyper key.
For awhile, I had a hyper key on my Mac. I used Karabiner to make the fn key (which usually only controls behavior of the f-keys) act as if command+ctrl+option+shift were pressed at all times, and then set up window management actions for tiling and moving between monitors using that otherwise difficult to press combination. Later OS updates made it more difficult to set that up though.
I also rebind the useless caps lock key to be escape, still. It's good for vim, and games that use escape to close in-game windows (Final Fantasy XIV, Minecraft, etc).
Rebinding caps lock is the best decision any keyboard owner can make.
Except I haven't, because I don't honestly know what I'd want to bind it to... Thanks for guilting me on that.
I made mine control and never looked back. It’s the biggest waste of space on your keyboard next to the space bar (which really should be split)
Thank you: taking that set up.
I wonder what the named keycode will be.
I'm constantly running out of combinations for my various automations that don't conflict w/ my usual programs or end up with no meaningful mnemonic to remember them by. I'd gladly take another key to combine, thousands of new unique combinations!
Required, huh? I'll be sure to add it to all of my existing keyboards.
I think they might mean required by "official" Microsoft keyboards or something.
I think it's for OEMs to be certified as "Windows 11 Ready" or whatever. It's not like they're going to make you press the key to verify you have a qualified keyboard to update your PC... yet ;)
Is copilot any good? I love tech in general but have struggled to find a use for all these LLMs. I keep looking at the app on Android and it fails to impress. Since we will be stuck with this stuff until the tech world moves onto whatever they decide is next, I would love to know what a normal techie can actually get out of it, if at all.
I never found a use for Cortana. How is this different/better?
Canary can use it to craft AI email responses. You can select positive, negative, or neutral.
It's fine, if you have to produce very bland corporate responses. Useless otherwise since it doesn't learn from your sent messages and ape your own tone.
Thankfully I respond to so few work emails these days that I really don't need a solution to streamline that process.
Can I teach it to handle people who slack me just "hi"?
Auto reply with this? https://nohello.net/en/
:)
(OK, a bit passive aggressive, but) I HATED that... worse when you finally see it 10 minutes later and they're offline -- if they'd have just sent their question I could have just answered it for them when I returned for them to see when they return.
Fine, say hi, but then start a new line and send the rest of your question IN THE SAME MESSAGE!
Though I'm not sure which was worse, possibly the
guy who
would
send one thought
in a bunch of
short messages like
this making my computer beep and
beep and beep
...so nice to work in a much smaller team right now where people don't do that. :)
It does depend on the culture though... A colleague of mine (Irish company) was told to preface their requests with more pleasantries, as they were coming across as brusque. When they actually did just go "hi, how are ya - can you...".
What they wanted my colleague to do was
[Response]
Which, admittedly is different to just saying 'hi', as this is actual smalltalk prior to a request...
It used to drive me crazy that everyone would do this. I got lucky though - I'm Dutch so I could just heavily lean on the 'the Dutch are a very direct people' stereotype and request everyone to NOT DO THAT. Instead just ask me what you need - and THEN ask about my weekend if you actually want to know how my weekend was.
God that would absolutely INFURIATE me. I hate when people say a pleasantry before their request, particularly via chat. I get that your intentions are pure, but you're actually just making the other person wait for you to phrase your question, which is lost productivity (and kinda annoying).
Very-much related website
People who say “Hi” or “Quick question” in chat and then wait for me to respond have almost a perfect correlation with being useless in my experience. I dunno why that is, but god it’s triggering
That's how my wife texts me so I get that a lot.
And agreed, I see you share my slack pain.
If they’re waiting for text based asynchronous chat to be synchronous, sorry that’s not how I work.
If I see you just sent “hey how was your weekend” I interpret that as “this is just a social chat, so don’t put your work down to reply, but I’d would be nice for you to get back to me at some stage later today” — and therefore I might actually reply just after I come back from lunch (even if you sent that message first thing in the morning) because that’s when I’m in the mindset for socialising.
On the other hand, if you chuck in your niceties but also add a request, I’ll probably get you the answer within less than a minute.
So if you’re looking for solutions, you’ll either learn pretty quickly how I work, or you won’t. Either way, that’s not my problem per se, but it would be nice if we were on the same page about it all.
There was actually a topic on ~comp a few days ago, if you want to read more people's opinions on it:
https://tildes.net/~comp/1d8v/on_github_copilot
Fwiw I think the Windows implementation of Copilot as a general assistant is pretty different from its original incarnation on GitHub as a code completion tool.
Ah, thanks for the info. I have yet to make use of Copilot assistant on Windows, so didn't realize they were so different.
Do you have any good articles on this, or just your general experience? I've used neither, but that sounds interesting.
Not direct experience, just what I've read about them. GitHub Copilot is geared towards programming tasks, basically an autocomplete or predictive text for coding. The Microsoft Copilot built into Windows is more like a suite of organizers, summarizes, and other language model tools designed to work with the Office suite, Edge browser, and the general OS. They're both flavors of GPT, but tuned for different use cases.
Will do!
I've slowly started to switch to edge when writing technical documentation as the co-pilot features on the right side of the screen make a lot of sense when trying to clean up my ADHD generated garbage. There is a button that copies the text from the right side of the browser into the web page wherever the cursor is and I assume this will be similar to how the features will be implemented on the operating system. But I do hope that we don't get stuck with a Microsoft ecosystem for this Microsoft is very good at letting things stagnate as they reach critical mass.
I like Copilot because it is ChatGPT with Internet access, which is very useful for synthesizing search queries. At work I often use it to track down primary sources for best practices, configurations, or even apecific questions.
It's basically Bing but you can converse with it for better searches or have it provide results, which it will cite sources for. I've used it for some batch scripting and it provided links for the code snippets it used.
I use Copilot Enterprise for work, but it may ne different on the free edition.
I'm all for extra keys on my keyboard, as long as they don't make rebinding it a pain in the ass. I'm looking at you,
Windows/Superkey!. But, truth be told, theFnkey is the bane of my existence.We're only 5 days into 2024...
The f#cking Copilot Key, a keyboard key literally only functional when connected to the internet, signed in with a Microsoft account, on one specific operating system.
At least the Windows, Mac, Super key are the same thing with a different key cap.
Edit:
Sounds like it'll probably be like this
I'm more interested in the emoji key on the keyboard in the picture. That would actually be kind of useful.
For now.
I expect that in a few years, it'll be easy to run AI offline. It already is, but with neural networks being so parallel and not yet being properly hardware-accelerated (apart from running on GPU), they have plenty of room to grow.
For the first time? MS keyboards added an Office key a few years ago.
They added a context button if I recall (the one on my surface is not Office specific), but I don't think it was a requirement to be "Windows certified"
The context menu key also dates back to Windows 95, but it has always been optional in every sense. I've never known anyone to actually use it intentionally, and it's not on any of the keyboards I use regularly.
Yeah, I just use shift-F10.
I use to use it to get around the block that prevents you from pulling up the context menu on some websites. It prevented right clicking, but not using the menu key. They got wise to that trick though. Not sure I've seen anyone else use it.
I use it on the occasions I have both my hands on keyboard, since it's faster than switching to M+KB just to right click and switch back.
Oh sweet another bind key for all my Linux stuff. Thanks Microsoft
Dave2D mentioned the key in his video on XPS 14 and 16. Explains that ig.
Summary from the article to save you a click:
No hate on OPs title, it's the same as the article title. Please do read the full article if it interests you, I'm just doing my anticlickbait duty.
@cfabbro, could you be a star and edit the title to include the actual key mentioned in the article :)? Pinging you as you helped with this last time
Sure thing. Added the article lede to the end of the topic title to help clarify things.
Much appreciated, thank you!!
CoPilot is an anagram for ClitPoo. Make of that what you will.
It's also an anagram for "Clip too".
That's right.
Clippy is BACK~!