- Windows 11’s Copilot app has a new feature in testing
- ‘PC Insights’ provides an easy way to receive clear answers to hardware-based questions about your device and its specifications
- Although there are some privacy (and bloat) fears, Microsoft has made it clear that Copilot must be allowed to access your system and files
Copilot gets a new ability to answer questions about your PC’s hardware, allowing the AI to tap into the relevant hardware details to do so – and while Microsoft is treading carefully with privacy here, it’s unlikely to stop a certain amount of paranoia.
Windows Latest marked the introduction of ‘PC Insights’ to the Copilot app on Windows 11, which, as Microsoft explains, “enables customers to ask Copilot questions about their Windows PC in conversation and receive clear answers based on their device’s state without having to dig through system settings.”
This is currently an experimental feature, so still in testing, and an optional feature that you must enable for it to be in-game. Windows Latest notes that it’s gradually rolling out, but only in the US for now.
You can ask Copilot how much RAM you have, or storage space left, or what your GPU is, and the current usage level of your processor, and a whole bunch of similar component-related queries. You can ask about items as diverse as whether you have an antivirus running or what your laptop’s battery health is, diving into mild troubleshooting territory if you wish.
To get its answers, the Copilot app connects to Windows APIs to analyze your system, and the AI asks for permission to do this. You can give it access to your PC’s hardware details on a one-off basis for that session only, or you can choose to “always allow” if you’re happy to give Copilot this access on a more permanent basis.
Analysis: fear of hallucinations and bloating
As always, this is artificial intelligence, and as Microsoft notes, Copilot “may not always provide complete or accurate information,” especially in this testing phase. So if you get a chance to try PC Insights, keep a healthy sense of skepticism about the answers you get.
As Windows Latest makes clear, there’s also some irony in a Windows 11 user checking up on resource usage, perhaps due to system sluggishness, and using Copilot AI to run diagnostics when the app itself is using the best part of 1GB of RAM running in the background doing nothing.
Of course, that doesn’t stop this new PC insight feature from being situationally useful. However, some of the reactions have come from a place of disdain, as you might guess, with comments like the one from this Redditor: “Oh hey, it’s like Task Manager, except instead of easy and authoritative, it’s bloated and maybe lying to me.”
Obviously, this is a feature aimed at less well-informed PC owners, not those who can easily understand what’s going on in Task Manager at a glance. The criticism surrounding the Copilot app’s bloat is fair enough, and that’s because in its latest incarnation, Microsoft changed things so that the app is essentially a standalone spin-off of the Edge browser.
Another concern is privacy and having Copilot ‘snoop around’ your machine, but as mentioned there are clear requests for permissions and the new feature is strictly opt-in. You never have to go near PC insight if you don’t want to. It’s also worth noting that giving the Copilot app access permissions doesn’t mean it can read the actual contents of files, only their sizes (to balance out storage issues and the like).
Currently, this is purely an informational or troubleshooting feature, and in the case of attempted diagnostics, it may point to problems with your PC, but won’t fix them for you. However, it’s not hard to imagine where Microsoft could go with this, in terms of getting Copilot to implement fixes for certain issues the AI flags. I’m talking about simple setting changes rather than anything in-depth, and this has always been the idea with Copilot (although it hasn’t been realized to any great extent yet).
When we get AI agents in Windows 11 – and they are coming, make no mistake – this kind of functionality could turn into a full-on troubleshooting agent. The problem (no pun intended) with that is that the mistakes and hallucinations the AI can make could be significantly more aggravating in these kinds of scenarios.
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