Microsoft Copilot vs. Copilot+: What's the Difference?

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said in no uncertain terms that the company is all-in on generative AI, going so far as to dub Microsoft “The Copilot company.” But some confusion must certainly arise from the company naming a new class of computers Copilot+ PCs after establishing the name Copilot for its generative AI tools. While, yes, the new class of computers can use Copilot, so can nearly every other PC, whether it’s running Windows 11 or Windows 10. So, what's the difference between Copilot and Copilot+? We're here to explain.

What Is Copilot? Microsoft's AI Chatbot

Copilot is Microsoft’s generative AI chatbot based on OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT large language models. It can generate text for emails, stories, poems, and essays. It can summarize search results, webpages, and text you feed it, as well as rewrite in different tones. It can also generate images, write computer code, and more.

To access Copilot, you can use any internet-connected device to go to the Copilot webpage (copilot.microsoft.com). Apps for Android, iOS, and Windows are also available. Copilot appears as a sidebar in the Edge web browser. That sidebar lets you summarize the current webpage, create images and prose, and carry out all the other Copilot functions.

For a $20-a-month subscription, you can upgrade to Copilot Pro, which gives you more choice of AI models, including the faster GPT-4 Turbo. It also gets you 100 “boosts” for image generation, without which you’d be waiting a while for Microsoft Designer to create your text-prompted images. Pro also lets you use Copilot features within Microsoft 365.

What Is Copilot+? Microsoft Computers With Neural Processing Units (NPUs)

Copilot+ refers to computers that have powerful neural processing units (NPUs). Those NPUs allow them to do AI machine-learning work right on the device rather than sending requests over the internet for processing on Microsoft’s servers. It’s similar to what Apple has announced with Apple Intelligence, where some functions are processed on-device, and others go over the internet to Apple’s servers. However, Microsoft says it informs customers when processing is sent over the internet to its servers.

The first batch of Copilot+ computers consists exclusively of machines powered by Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors. Soon, however, Intel, AMD, and Nvidia-powered machines will be getting into the game, though no timeline has been announced for these releases.

What Makes a Copilot+ PC Different?

Copilot+ isn’t just a set of PC specifications; it’s also a set of AI capabilities, only tangentially related to Copilot proper. These capabilities, which I list below, take advantage of Microsoft’s new small language models, which are better suited to the less beefy computing power on a personal computer than what you find in a server farm. The capabilities are:

• Recall, which lets you get back to whatever you were doing on your PC over a specific timeframe

• Cocreator, for on-device collaborative image creation

• Windows Studio Effects, for visual enhancements for video calls

• Live Captions, for real-time subtitles with translation for spoken audio in videos and calls

• Automatic Super Resolution, for improved frame rate and resolution in video games

Notably, it’s not just Microsoft software that can take advantage of the NPU hardware in Copilot+ PCs. Apps like Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, Algoriddim Djay Pro, and Liquid Text also tap the special capabilities of the chips. Let's go into a little more detail about each of these new features and enhancements.

Recall: The Infamous Copilot+ Feature

The most touted new Copilot+ feature has also turned out to be the most controversial: Recall. It snaps screenshots periodically as you use your PC and then lets you look back via search to find anything you were doing in a set time period. The feature doesn’t record private browsing sessions and everything stays on the local device.

Tech experts and news outlets jumped on Recall, claiming it's easily compromised. This prompted the company to make Recall opt-in rather than enabled by default. In fact, even before the first Copilot+ PCs shipped for sale, the feature was relegated to an Insider Preview build. Once these privacy wrinkles are ironed out, Recall could be extremely useful, with some early testers saying they're wowed by it.

Local AI Image Generation With Cocreator

The venerable but much-updated Microsoft Paint app has AI image generation in every Windows 11 PC, but in a Copilot+ PC, you get Cocreator. With Cocreator, you can draw a simple sketch, tell the AI to complete the image in a certain way, and voilà, you have a new collaborative creation, only your collaborator is a machine! With Cocreator, you need a text prompt, a sketch, and selected Style—Water Color, Oil Painting, Ink Sketch, Anime, or Pixel Art.

Subtle Video Call Enhancements With Windows Studio Effects

Windows Studio Effects are enhancements to video calls that work with not only Microsoft Teams but also any major video conferencing app—Zoom, Google Meet, and so on. These effects appear in a button in the Quick Settings panel (previously known as the Action Center). You get choices for Portrait Light, Portrait Blur, Standard Blur, three Creative Filters, Eye Contact, and Automatic Framing. Most of the effects are rather mild and not game changers.

Live Captions and Translations

Live Captions are a boon for those with hearing loss, non-native speakers, and anyone in a noisy environment. The version of Live Captions in Copilot+ not only gives you on-screen captioning for any spoken audio on the PC, but can also translate them, with a planned 40 different languages—it's coming but not here yet. When I tested Live Captions, a tooltip told me that it couldn’t translate spoken text into most languages, but it could translate captions into English from 20 languages. You need to download a language pack for any language you want to use. You can select text size and position and use an optional profanity filter.

Automatic Super Resolution for Your Games

The frame rate-enhancing Automatic Super Resolution performs a similar function to Nvidia’s DLSS, FSR, and Intel’s XeSS but is available only on Copilot+ PC systems.

PCMag’s gaming hardware analysts found that Automatic Super Resolution is generally a success in testing game compatibility on Copilot+ PCs. It noticeably improved the frame rates and appearance in Borderlands 3, where it boosted frame rates by 11-12 frames per second.

What’s Next for Copilot+?

My biggest hope is that Copilot+ PCs, with their extra AI-processing capabilities, will eventually be able to handle all or at least most of the high power consumption that generative AI exacts in server farms. For now, I can say that using a Copilot+ PC on and off for a few weeks has been almost without issue. As for regular Copilot (which is still labeled as in Preview), I’ve been using it successfully for months to find hidden answers to specific questions on the web, create images, occasionally suggest text edits, and summarize web results and pages. I look forward to doing all (or at least most) of that using local hardware.