Microsoft has added several new AI-powered features to Windows in the last few months, but the talk of the town is 'AI Explorer', which may be the selling point for AI PCs. According to a recent report by Windows Central, Microsoft might unveil AI Explorer at the upcoming special Windows event on May 20. However, AI Explorer might be limited to devices powered by Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon X series CPU, which features an integrated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that helps perform AI tasks locally on the machine itself instead of sending a query to the cloud. What is AI Explorer? The much-anticipated feature will reportedly make the world's most popular operating system more advanced by giving it contextual awareness across the board and making everything you do on your PC searchable. It might also work across all apps and help users search for things like the webpages or images they opened as well as help them search conversations. What can AI Explorer do? AI Explorer might be able to summarise conversations, web pages and emails. Since the processing happens on the machine itself, it will be much faster than cloud-based AI chatbots like Copilot and Gemini and users will be able to exclude certain apps from being recorded by the upcoming functionality or disable it if they want AI to snoop on whatever they are doing. The report suggests that AI Explorer will have a UI that appears on top of the screen. It records user actions and makes everything you do searchable. The upcoming feature can also be under natural language, meaning you can ask your Windows 11-powered machine questions like "find me conversations I've had about the Fallout TV show" and the AI-powered functionality will then show the chats where you talked about the show. But AI Explorer is not only a search engine for your PC. The feature will reportedly be able to analyse the things on your screen and offer suggestions like "remove the background of this image using Paint" with a single click. Another feature called "Screen Understanding" can help users generate email replies, and compare two documents using Microsoft Copilot. Apart from AI Explorer, Microsoft is also working on a bunch of other features like real-time live captions and translation, game upscaling and frame rate smoothing and a new Windows Studio Effects.
