The messaging coming out of Microsoft is becoming unmistakable. The next version of Windows is going to be all about chat.
Last week, Microsoft posted a video that claimed, "the world of mousing around and keyboarding around and typing will feel as alien as it does to Gen Z to use DOS." Now there's a new interview on the official Windows IT Pro YouTube channel with Microsoft's Windows and devices boss Pavan Davuluri that doubles down on that idea and predicts, "you'll be able to speak to your computer, while writing, inking, or interacting with another person."
When asked how the way we interact with computers is going to change in the next few years, Davuluri says, "I think we will see computing become more ambient, more pervasive, continue to span form factors, and certainly become multimodal in the arc of time. "
Multimodal? That means, "voice and vision and pen and touch." Davuluri explains that, "today, one of the things we celebrate in Windows is the diversity on form factors."
But in future, "experience diversity is the next space where we will continue to see voice become more important." So, how will that actually work? The good news is that it doesn't seem like Davuluri thinks voice will replace keyboard and mouse, as implied by David Weston, corporate vice president of enterprise and OS security at Microsoft, last week.
Instead, it'll be all about that quote from earlier, about a more natural interaction where your PC "can actually look at your screen and is context aware" and will therefore, "semantically understand your intent to interact with it."
Without a demo of this new approach, it's hard to be totally sure how it will work. But one can imagine typing away on a word document while making conversational requests, maybe along the lines of, "oh, can you open that webpage on jelly fish clogging up nuclear reactors I was looking at earlier," or, "make that bullet pointed list above numbered"
The idea is that it will all be smooth and seamless and frictionless. To put it succinctly, the new AI-powered modalities will allow you to get into a "flow" state when using your PC. Davuluri thinks net impact will give Microsoft, "the ability to for us to find users in the flow of their tasks and have the AI models that help them with the intent and flow of their tasks" and users, "the ability to superpower their productivity on a day to day basis."
Davuluri details a few specifics, such as improvements to Windows Search, which will be, "much more meaningful, much more impactful," and also discusses the broader implications of combining local AI models with cloud computing.
As for time frames, Microsoft is already bringing some of these features to Windows 11 through its Copilot AI platform. But the gist from these videos seems to be that the big change and perhaps a new OS altogether, call it Windows 12 or even Windows Chat, will arrive within five years and thus probably before 2030. As as ever, watch this space for more.
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