- Windows 11 Copilot app has new feature in testing
- ‘PC Insights’ provides an easy way to receive clear answers to hardware-based questions about your device and its specifications.
- While there are some fears about privacy (and bloat), Microsoft has made it clear that Copilot must be granted permission to access your system and files.
Copilot is getting a new ability to answer questions about your PC hardware, allowing the AI to access the relevant hardware details to do so, and while Microsoft is treating privacy carefully here, that’s unlikely to stop some level of paranoia.
Windows Latest marked the introduction of ‘PC Information’ for the Copilot app in Windows 11, which, as Microsoft explains, “allows customers to conversationally ask Copilot questions about their Windows PC and receive clear answers based on the status of their device without having to dig through system settings.”
This is currently an experimental feature, so it’s still in testing, and an optional ability that you must activate for it to be in play. Windows Latest notes that it is rolling out gradually, but for now only in the US.
You can ask Copilot how much RAM you have, or storage space left, or what your GPU is, and the current level of usage of your processor, and a bunch of similar component-related queries. You can ask about things as diverse as whether you have antivirus running or what the status of your laptop’s battery is, and delve into mild troubleshooting territory if you want.
To get answers, the Copilot app connects to Windows APIs to analyze your system and the AI asks for permission to do so. You can allow access to your PC hardware details just once for that session only, or you can choose to “always allow” if you’re willing to grant Copilot this access on a more permanent basis.
Analysis: fears of hallucinations and swelling
As always, this is AI, and as Microsoft notes, Copilot “may not always provide complete or accurate information,” especially during this testing phase. Therefore, if you have the opportunity to try out PC ideas, maintain a healthy sense of skepticism with the answers you get.
As Windows Latest makes clear, there’s also some irony in a Windows 11 user checking resource usage, perhaps due to system slowness, and employing Copilot AI to run diagnostics when the app itself uses most of 1GB of RAM when it runs in the background and does nothing.
Of course, that doesn’t stop this new PC information feature from being useful in certain situations. However, some of the reaction comes from a place of disdain, as you can imagine, with comments like this Redditor’s: “Oh hey, it’s like Task Manager, except instead of being lightweight and authoritative, it’s bloated and might be lying to me.”
Of course, this is a feature aimed at less informed PC owners, not those who can easily understand what’s going on in Task Manager at a glance. The criticism around the bloat of the Copilot app is pretty fair, and this is because in its most recent incarnation, Microsoft changed things so that the app is essentially a standalone derivative of the Edge browser.
Another concern is privacy and Copilot ‘snooping’ around your machine, but as noted, there are clear requests for permissions and the new feature is strictly voluntary. You’ll never have to go near PC information if you don’t want to. It’s also worth noting that granting the Copilot app access permissions doesn’t mean it can read the actual contents of the files, just their sizes (to weigh questions about storage and the like).
At the moment, this is a purely informational or troubleshooting feature and, in the case of diagnostic attempts, it may indicate problems with your PC, but it will not solve 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 that the AI flags. I’m talking about simple configuration changes rather than anything in-depth, and this has always been the idea of Copilot (although it’s still largely unrealized).
When we get AI agents in Windows 11 (and they are coming, make no mistake), this type of functionality can become a full-fledged troubleshooting agent. The problem (unintentional) with this is that the errors and hallucinations that the AI can make could be considerably more aggravating in this type of scenario.
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