It's been a big week for Microsoft, as the company hosted its annual Build developer event, gathering attendees in person for the first time since 2019. Not only that, but the company actually had some pretty interesting announcements at the show, covering different facets of its business, including Windows. There was a lot, and if you weren't able to catch up on all the news, we've rounded up our favorite announcements from Build 2023 below.
1 Windows Copilot
Microsoft has been expanding the Copilot branding significantly this year, and at Build, the company finally announced it's coming to Windows, bringing even more capabilities to the table. Windows Copilot is built on the same backbone as experiences like Bing Chat, and that means you can ask it all the same questions you could ask Bing. Whether you need to know what time it is in a different country or you want an answer to a more complex question, Windows Copilot can help.
But being built into Windows means there's a lot more. Windows Copilot can, for example, be used to change system settings. If you ask Copilot to help you focus, it can propose starting a focus session and changing your PC to dark mode. You can also ask it to snap two apps side-by-side. Even more impressively, Windows Copilot can work with content in your clipboard, rewriting a text you've copied, sending an image to your contacts, and so on.
It's all very impressive, and with Windows Copilot set to debut with Windows Insiders in June, we're, needless to say, excited to give it a shot.
2 Bing comes to ChatGPT
Another big piece of news that's particularly important to Microsoft is that Bing is coming to ChatGPT as the default search engine. This is major; ChatGPT is arguably the most popular generative conversational AI on the market right now, but it suffered somewhat from the lack of a search engine, meaning it couldn't obtain new information in real-time in the same way Bing can.
Bringing Bing over is bound to give the search engine a boost in popularity while also providing new capabilities for ChatGPT users. It does potentially take away some of the benefits of using Bing Chat, like the ability to search the web, but it's a big step in making assistive AI more accessible and useful to everyone. Microsoft and OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) are also using a common platform for plugins, so the capabilities of both Bing Chat and ChatGPT will grow in tandem.
3 Redesigned File Explorer
While Microsoft didn't actually announce or talk about it, the company did show us a fresh new look at a redesigned File Explorer in Windows 11. While there have been reports about this previously, this first official look showed us that the new File Explorer will have a design language that's even more in line with Windows 11. The address and search bars have a more modern look and live right below the tab bar, while file and folder actions are moved below it.
The short teaser also showed off a new look for the navigation pane that also follows the Windows 11 design language. We also saw recommended files on the Home page and the new Gallery view, which is already in testing with Windows Insiders. We still don't know when the rest of the design changes will become publicly available, though.
4 Improved app restore (and other Microsoft Store updates)
Windows has never been particularly good at restoring your apps from a previous device, but as part of its Build announcements, Microsoft revealed some improvements coming on this front. With a future update, the Microsoft Store will now be able to not only restore your apps from a previous device but also restore pinned apps on the Start menu and taskbar. That way, when you set up a new computer or reset your current one, your existing Microsoft Store apps will be available where they were before.
There are a few other interesting updates for the Microsoft Store, perhaps the most notable being AI-generated review summaries. Indeed, in the future, the Microsoft Store will read the user reviews for a given app and generate a summary of the overall impressions of users, so you know what you're getting into without reading all the reviews yourself. Plus, for developers, ads are expanding to new locations to increase the reach of your apps, and AI can also be used to create additional tags for your app and make it easier to find.
5 More Windows 11 features
While Microsoft announced the availability of new Windows 11 features as part of the Moment 3 update at Build, the company also shared quite a bit that had not been mentioned yet. Some of these features may have flown under the radar, but they're still big.
One of them is the returning support for taskbar ungrouping, meaning each instance of an app is shown as an individual item on the taskbar, complete with labels for each one. Microsoft is also adding native support for opening more archive file formats, such as .rar and .7z, so you no longer need a third-party app. Another new feature is a Dynamic Lighting page in the Settings app, which will let you control the RGB lighting of your peripherals in a centralized interface rather than relying on multiple third-party apps for each peripheral.
Microsoft also announced that Windows 11 will soon be able to run Win32 apps in isolation, a feature that was originally expected to appear in the canceled Windows 10X. This adds a layer of security by preventing changes to other parts of your system that could otherwise compromise it. The company also mentioned support for Bluetooth Low Energy Audio with the Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 Pro, with other devices set to be supported in the future. This should deliver higher-quality audio while using less power.
There's still more
While these are our favorite announcements from the show, there's a lot more to come. Dev Home is an interesting new app that makes life easier for developers, even including the option to create a Dev Drive for faster performance. There's also a Microsoft Edge redesign on the way with Microsoft 365 Copilot integration, and of course, more apps are being optimized for Arm. On that note, Microsoft also confirmed that support for Arm32 apps will be dropped with the next generation of Windows and future Qualcomm processors.