- Microsoft has a new ad for the Christmas and holiday season on YouTube
- It promotes ‘Hey Copilot’ voice input and AI functionality in Windows 11
- There have been some negative reactions to the ad, and it risks giving viewers unrealistic expectations of Copilot
Windows 11 has an ad for the holiday season (it’s December, in case you hadn’t noticed) that features Copilot—and surprise, surprise, it’s causing controversy.
Windows Latest featured Microsoft’s new ad for the AI assistant, which is part of the ‘meet the computer you can talk to’ series of commercials (set to background music from A-punk by Vampire Weekend).
These are all about displaying people using the ‘Hey Copilot’ wake-up prompt (hence the song, which contains a lot of ‘hey’) and then verbally interacting with the desktop assistant to perform tasks of one kind or another.
This is all part of a new drive to push not just AI, but voice input as the next big thing in terms of interacting with your PC (pushing aside the mouse and keyboard, at least to some extent).
In this new ad, we see various family settings and requests that include syncing Christmas lights to music using the Windows 11 PC, figuring out instructions, and checking rules for placing outdoor decorations (an inflatable reindeer). There’s a humorous angle here, and even a cameo from Santa getting a toy collection report.
You can give it a watch below (and here’s a previous ad from this series from last month if you want a broader perspective).
Look at
Analysis: high expectations
As you can probably guess given all the controversy that’s been bubbling up lately around the topic of AI in Windows 11 in general, this ad hasn’t gone down well at all in some quarters. (Though, as Windows Latest makes clear, not all of the reaction has been negative).
Some of the comments on Microsoft’s YouTube clip are, shall we say, quite barbed about possible Copilot voice commands (which get the thumbs up). Like ‘Hey Copilot – how can I uninstall you?’ or ‘Hey Copilot – how can I install Linux’ or ‘downgrade to Windows 10’ and well, you get the picture.
I feel it’s a bit unfair to Microsoft, albeit quite predictably, simply because, to quote an oft-quoted sentiment on social media in recent times, people are tired of having ‘AI shoved down their throats’ with Windows 11. And Microsoft has just stepped up all these AI marketing efforts, part of which is this new ‘PC you can talk to’ campaign.
To me, voice input is a pretty cool bit of technology – I’ve been using it for a long time in Windows, actually way before Windows 11 came out. I’m glad to see voice commands getting deeper integration into the OS (which has been happening for a while) and I think it’s all good stuff, undoubtedly useful for some basic functionality.
Where it becomes more problematic is in some of the complexities of tying it all together with AI. First, because we’re currently going through something of a revolt against AI by a good portion of Windows 11 users (and Windows 10 holdouts, for that matter, as yet another reason not to upgrade). So everything about AI is attracting a fair amount of heat right now.
And while voice input, and indeed Copilot Vision – which can guide you through queries based on your screen content and even offer guided help with some apps – are useful, there’s a problem with managing expectations here.
This latest ad has a big problem for me, which is the opening scene where the Copilot is asked to sync the Christmas lights to the beat of the music being played, and in no time, that task is accomplished. Can Copilot actually do this? No, it can’t – there’s no functionality to connect smart home gadgets like lights to your Windows 11 PC and somehow have Copilot guide you on how to fix this (let alone do it for you).
Therefore, a bubble of expectation is inflated here, ready to be burst if someone buys a Copilot+ PC on the basis of this ad and sets out to achieve some kind of similar task. Now, Copilot Vision can offer useful guidance, as mentioned, but it’s still rough around the edges and pretty limited – so the reality of the feature is going to disappoint.
I don’t think it’s a good start to the less tech-savvy buyer’s experience with their new AI PC, and Microsoft needs to be careful here. You could argue that it’s illustrative of where Microsoft is aiming to go with Copilot—which is probably the intent of this element of the ad, that it’s a conceptual snapshot of what the future of this feature might hold—but that doesn’t sit well with me. I’m not going to advertise a flying car and later reveal that the gliders are coming, at some point down the line; but no, you can’t glide around the sky yet.
Microsoft is building up Copilot’s part too much here and creating further division around AI, if anything, neither of which feels like a sensible move.
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