- Windows 11 has a new preview which bolsters its voice commands
- You can now give commands using natural speech rather than stilted phrasing
- Microsoft is also fine-tuning Recall and squashing some bugs therein
Windows 11 is getting new powers for Copilot+ PCs that’ll let the owner give voice commands to their laptop more easily, using natural language.
This is coming to Copilot+ PCs with Snapdragon (Arm-based) processors, and it has only just been introduced to testing in the Dev channel with preview build 26120.3576.
It’s an expansion of the functionality of Voice Access commands, whereby you can give voice instructions to Windows 11 such as ‘Open Chrome’ to fire up your web browser.
Right now, if you deliver a voice command along the lines of ‘Can you open my Chrome browser,’ this won’t work – you have to stick to the exact syntax of ‘Open Chrome.’
With this change in testing, though, you’ll be able to ask in different ways, and Windows 11 will understand if you say, for example, ‘Please open the Chrome browser’ or similar.
Essentially, you can relax and use natural speech – as you would with a query delivered to an AI like Copilot – with Voice commands under Windows 11, without having to worry about getting any given command exactly correct in terms of its phrasing. Note that this feature is rolling out to testers, so some Windows Insiders may not get it straight away.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that Microsoft is further bolstering Voice Access in Windows 11 to support the Chinese language in this latest preview build (with both simplified and traditional Chinese options).
Microsoft has also done some tuning of the controversial Recall feature in this build, fixing some bugs (such as snapshots failing to save), and changing the Click to Do capability so its ‘intelligent text actions’ are now handled locally, rather than in the cloud. Essentially, that’s about keeping a tighter lid on security and processing Recall-related features on the device, rather than sending any data cloud-wards.
There’s a clutch of other bug fixes here, too, and you can see the full details in Microsoft’s blog post about this new preview build.
Analysis: A good move, no doubt – but let’s have it on all Copilot+ PCs
How many folks use voice commands on their PC? Well, they are very useful for those with accessibility needs, of course, and potentially handy and convenient for any Windows 11 user. Having to get the commands exactly correct may have limited their appeal thus far, though, so bringing in a more natural use of language here is going to be a positive step forward for the popularity of this feature.
Voice Access will also be clever enough so that if it doesn’t understand the instruction that’s been issued, it will look for close matches in its library of commands, and present those as suggestions – you can then pick one if it is indeed the command you intended.
This is clearly good work from Microsoft to try and make voice commands more useful, although it should be underlined that this is for Snapdragon (Arm-based) Copilot+ PCs only. Whether that’ll change to include other Copilot+ PCs with Intel or AMD processors remains to be seen, as Microsoft doesn’t mention this (and the software giant usually would in release notes like this). Still, I don’t see any reason why there wouldn’t be a wider deployment of this new functionality eventually.
As a final note, we must remember that nothing in testing is guaranteed to make the cut for release, but it’d be very surprising if Microsoft curtailed this particular line of development.
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