Microsoft has pushed generative AI features into every corner of Windows 11, but most of them aren’t actually useful to most people, and some of them are actively distracting or harmful. Thankfully, the latest addition is actually great: a ‘Describe image’ feature.
Describe image is in the same Click to Do menu that already has options for blurring image backgrounds, erasing objects, and other actions. You can open the menu on a compatible Windows 11 PC by pressing the Q and Windows keyboard keys together, or clicking the mouse while holding down the Windows key.
So, why is this useful? Well, if you have limited vision, this feature can describe any image or visual content as spoken text. This could also be a great way to make image descriptions for documents, articles, presentations, art, or anything else with visual elements. For example, every image in every article I write here at How-To Geek needs an alternative text description, so screen readers and search engines can understand them. Most other publications and websites do the same thing for images.
I built my own browser extension a while back for quickly writing image descriptions, using OpenAI’s GPT cloud model, and it looks like this Windows feature creates similar results. The main catch is that even after it rolls out to stable Windows 11, it will require a Copilot+ PC. This feature can definitely work on any PC with a moderately-powerful GPU and enough RAM. For example, you can get similar results with LM Studio by dragging an image into the chat window, after downloading vision-compatible model like Google Gemma 3 4B.
Windows 11 Is Bringing Back Another Windows 10 Feature
Microsoft is bringing back a much-loved feature from Windows 10 in the latest test builds of Windows 11. No, it’s not a vertical taskbar. No, it’s not fewer advertisements. It’s a clock. Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26200.5651 KB5060818 is now rolling out in the Dev Channel, and it brings back the clock in the notification center calendar that was previously found in Windows 10. The clock appears above the date and calendar, with hours, minutes, and seconds. The clock in the taskbar itself is not changing, since there has been an option for seconds in the taskbar for a while now.
Microsoft said in the blog post, “The new describe image action in Click to Do is rolling out to Windows Insiders on Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs, with support for AMD and Intel-powered Copilot+ PCs coming soon.”
The Insider build has some other useful changes, like an updated design for privacy dialogs, an 'Administrator protection' feature for performing admin actions, the deprecation of PowerShell 2.0, and more. Many of these updates already showed up in other preview builds in the Insider channels.
Source: Windows Insider Blog
