Microsoft has finally delivered an experimental release of the Windows App SDK with artificial intelligence APIs. I took it for a spin.
Announced at the May 2024 launch of Arm-powered Copilot+ PCs, the Windows Copilot Runtime is at the heart of Microsoft’s push to bring AI inferencing out from Azure and on to the edge and our laptops. Since then it’s been released in drip-feed form with new features arriving every couple of months, many still tied to Insider builds of the Windows 11, Version 24H2 release.

Most of those new AI features have been user-facing, missing many of the key developer features necessary for third parties to build their own AI-powered applications. Much of the infrastructure needed to build Windows AI applications depends on the Windows App SDK, and the new APIs only finally arrived in the latest experimental channel release.

Channeling the Windows App SDK

The Windows App SDK is released in three channels: stable, preview, and experimental. The current stable channel is Version 1.6.4 and allows you to publish your code in the Microsoft Store. The next major release will be 1.7, which has had three different experimental releases to date. The latest of these, 1.7.0-experimental3, is the first to include support for Windows Copilot Runtime APIs, with a stable release due sometime in the first half of 2025.

This new release adds support for a neural processing unit (NPU)-optimized version of Microsoft’s small language model (SLM), Phi Silica. SLMs like Phi Silica provide many of the capabilities of much larger LLMs while running at lower power. Like OpenAI’s GPT, Phi Silica will respond to prompts, generate text, and provide summaries. It can also reformat text, for example creating tables. Other AI tools work with the Windows Copilot Runtime’s computer vision models, offering optical character recognition (OCR), image resizing, description, and segmentation. Interestingly, Microsoft is reserving access to these capabilities to code using the Windows App SDK.

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Source : https://www.infoworld.com/article/3823290/diving-into-the-windows-copilot-runtime.html