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.

Topics

Computing Writer

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

Computing

Microsoft finally adds missing Copilot+ AI tools to Intel and AMD PCs

Copilot+ PCs being announced from the stage.

If you bought into the promise of a new AI-charged Copilot+ PC with the latest-gen Intel or AMD processor, and found a few tricks missing, the long wait is over. A handful of those Copilot+ features are finally expanding beyond machines with a Snapdragon X series processor inside.

It’s roughly been a year since Microsoft introduced the Copilot+ PC label, a new breed of computing machines that put AI performance at the forefront. For months, Qualcomm was the sole silicon supplier for such machines.

Computing

Microsoft 365 Copilot gets an AI Researcher that everyone will love

Researcher agent in action inside Microsoft 365 Copilot app.

Microsoft is late to the party, but it is finally bringing a deep research tool of its own to the Microsoft 365 Copilot platform across the web, mobile, and desktop. Unlike competitors such as Google Gemini, Perplexity, or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, all of which use the Deep Research name, Microsoft is going with the Researcher agent branding.
The overarching idea, however, isn’t too different. You tell the Copilot AI to come up with thoroughly researched material on a certain topic or create an action plan, and it will oblige by producing a detailed document that would otherwise take hours of human research and compilation. It’s all about performing complex, multi-step research on your behalf as an autonomous AI agent.
Just to avoid any confusion early on, Microsoft 365 Copilot is essentially the rebranded version of the erstwhile Microsoft 365 (Office) app. It is different from the standalone Copilot app, which is more like a general purpose AI chatbot application.
Researcher: A reasoning agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot
How Researcher agent works?
Underneath the Researcher agent, however, is OpenAI’s Deep Research model. But this is not a simple rip-off. Instead, the feature’s implementation in Microsoft 365 Copilot runs far deeper than the competition. That’s primarily because it can look at your own material, or a business’ internal data, as well.
Instead of pulling information solely from the internet, the Researcher agent can also take a look at internal documents such as emails, chats, internal meeting logs, calendars, transcripts, and shared documents. It can also reference data from external sources such as Salesforce, as well as other custom agents that are in use at a company.
“Researcher’s intelligence to reason and connect the dots leads to magical moments,” claims Microsoft. Researcher agent can be configured by users to reference data from the web, local files, meeting recordings, emails, chats, and sales agent, on an individual basis — all of them, or just a select few.

Why it stands out?

Computing

Missing Copilot? Microsoft’s latest Windows patch restores the AI after mistakenly deleting it

Microsoft Copilot Pro.

In an update to its Support page, Microsoft announced that it's aware of the March 11th update bug that accidentally uninstalled Copilot from PCs. The Verge previously reported on the issue. Microsoft says the affected PCs "are being returned to their original state," so if you missed Copilot, it should be back on your PC.

We first reported on the March update bug wiping Copilot from Windows PCs and said that Microsoft encouraged users to reinstall the app and manually pin it back to the taskbar. Microsoft also said, "We're aware of an issue with the Microsoft Copilot app affecting some devices. The app is unintentionally uninstalled and unpinned from the taskbar," the company explained in updated support documents. "This issue has not been observed with the Microsoft 365 Copilot app."