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5 hours ago
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Microsoft has continued to shovel AI into its built-in Windows inbox apps, and now it's rolling out a Notepad update that will use Copilot to write text for you.
The updates come in the same week that Redmond released a snappy, lightweight command line editor that is the antithesis of what the venerable Notepad has become.
Notepad's Write feature requires users to sign in with their Microsoft account, select where they want the new content to go (or make a selection for reference), and then choose Write from the Copilot menu to prompt the AI to generate text, which you can review and insert into Notepad if it fits your needs.
The output can then be kept, discarded, or refined with follow-up prompts.
It is unclear who asked for this, or why Microsoft thinks users of a once-simple text editor require this assistance. If it were necessary, then surely an app like WordPad would have been a better place (if Microsoft hadn't killed it off, presumably so it could better focus on bloating Notepad).
At least with Outlook in Microsoft 365, the idea of letting an AI write emails for you could appeal to overly busy middle managers or people who struggle to come up with written communication. But Notepad is primarily used for quick and dirty tasks like jotting down ideas or pasting fussily formatted files into plain text to make the actual text more easily portable.
Microsoft's AI ambitions for Notepad first appeared just over a year ago. In November 2024, a "Rewrite" function turned up, with options to tweak text based on the tone, format, and length requirements of a user.
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Notepad dates back to Windows 1.0 and remained more or less unchanged for decades, with only an occasional fix. In recent years, however, it has undergone multiple tweaks and enhancements at the hands of Microsoft, culminating in the new generative AI features.
Microsoft is adding more AI features to another inbox tool – Paint. After giving the aging tool a reprieve in 2019, Microsoft wasted no time giving it a makeover. The latest changes come from Microsoft's AI stable and include a sticker generator (type what you want, and a set of stickers will be generated from the prompt) and a smart selection tool for isolating and editing individual elements in an image.
For users who can't keep up with all the new features, there's also a new "welcome experience."
It is difficult to see many of these updates as much more than additions for the sake of adding them. We doubt that users were clamoring for AI in Notepad in the same way that they might be demanding Microsoft stops shipping updates that bork the operating system. ®
