Microsoft will soon use AI to help you find your photos and files on Copilot+ PCs

By Judy Sanhz Published March 25, 2025

The Surface Laptop shown in front of a Copilot+ sign. — Luke Larsen / Digital Trends

In a Windows Insider blog post, Microsoft announced an AI upgrade to Windows Search to make finding photos, documents, and settings easier. However, the enhanced feature is restricted to Copilot+ PCs with Snapdragon processors; AMD and Intel support is coming soon.

The update has all the same fixes and improvements from build 26100.3613; nonetheless, some of the best Copilot+ PCs will be left out simply because they use AMD or Intel processors. Microsoft will release the update gradually, and you can also take advantage of both semantic and lexical indexing to search for your photos and documents more efficiently. Because of this improvement, you don’t have to remember the exact file name you’re looking for, which is a huge time-saver.

Recommended Videos

With this improvement, Windows Search and the NPUs that deliver 40 TOPS, Copilot+ PCs, offer a smarter and faster search experience. Microsoft explains how the upgraded search works: “You can use your own words in the search box at the top right corner of File Explorer, like ‘summer picnics’”. In addition to photos stored locally on your Copilot+ PC, photos from the cloud will now show up in the search results together. Exact matches for your keywords within the text of your cloud files will also show in the search results.” You can try this on your personal OneDrive right now and test it out.

Beyond search, Microsoft is also busy testing a new aspect inside the Settings of a Windows 11 preview build that lets you add more functions to specific apps using the Settings menu. While there is no official release date for AMD and Intel PCs yet, hopefully, it won’t be far off.

Computing Writer

Judy Sanhz is a Digital Trends computing writer covering all computing news. Loves all operating systems and devices.

Topics

Computing

Google Gemini’s best AI tricks finally land on Microsoft Copilot

Copilot app for Mac

Microsoft’s Copilot had a rather splashy AI upgrade fest at the company’s recent event. Microsoft made a total of nine product announcements, which include the agentic trick called Actions, Memory, Vision, Pages, Shopping, and Copilot Search.

A healthy few have already appeared on rival AI products such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, alongside much smaller players like Perplexity and browser-maker Opera. However, two products that have found some vocal fan-following with Gemini and ChatGPT have finally landed on the Copilot platform.

Computing

I never use my Microsoft Copilot subscription. I still think it’s worth it

Microsoft 356 apps.

If you have a regular subscription, you’re likely well-versed in the dance of paying for something and wondering if it’s worth the value. For many people, that might be a streaming service that hasn’t been used in six or more months or a membership for a gym that hasn’t been visited since before that last holiday. For me, I grapple with what to do with my Microsoft 365 subscription, specifically after the recent price hike due to the addition of Copilot+ features.

Microsoft 365 is one of those interesting computer suites that you don’t realize that you need until you need it. It's likely why I’ve allowed Microsoft to snatch money from my bank account for several years, when I only use one or two programs and one or two features.

Computing

Microsoft Copilot gets an AI agent to browse the web for you

Launching a search with Microsoft Copilot Actions.

Microsoft’s 50th anniversary event was quite loaded, but the company reserved most of its attention for the Copilot AI stack. The buzzy event introduced two crucial upgrades – Actions and Deep Research — which firmly push Copilot into the realm of agentic AI.

Agentic AI is essentially a fancy way of describing an AI tool that can perform multi-step web-based tasks autonomously, or semi-autonomously, on your behalf. In Copilot’s case, the fancier one is Actions. So far, AI chatbots have mostly been able to give answers based on a certain input, but haven’t been able to perform autonomous multi-stage actions.