I spent a day using the various Copilot+ AI programs available on the HP EliteBook Ultra to answer one of the main questions about any new AI PC: Is it worth buying?
Copilot+ Snapdragon laptops offer improved performance and battery life, and another key selling point is the onboard AI capabilities powered by the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU.
But what features does the Copilot+ laptop have?
Microsoft has recalled the Recall feature, which captures snapshots of users’ laptop activity, leaving behind the AI Cocreate program in Windows Paint, live captions with AI language translation, enhanced Studio camera effects, and the Copilot AI assistant.
All other AI features on the Copilot+ laptop require third-party applications that aren’t pre-installed on the machine, such as enhanced generative AI in Adobe Photoshop and gesture motion control by Cephable.
Enhanced AI features aren’t as good as expected
Cocreate in Windows Paint lets you draw your own images, but it works just as well as any other text-to-image AI image generation tool with Stable Diffusion, which is readily available from Open AI’s Dall-E 2, Figma, Adobe Firefly, Pixlr, and even Microsoft’s Copilot assistant. And in my day-to-day work, I have no reason to use image generation.
Copilot+’s live caption feature is perhaps its most interesting feature to me, and it works better in a quiet environment than on a crowded demo floor. But you still get better translations via YouTube or most video chat apps. Copilot+’s live caption software also struggles to identify accents and languages, and there’s a noticeable delay when translating slang.
It was fun to confuse the system by rattling off a few phrases in Japanese and reciting Dante’s “Divine Comedy” in Italian to see if it could translate accurately even while standing far away from the laptop, but again, it’s not a feature you’ll need to use often.
Copilot+’s live captioning feature is perhaps the most interesting to me, as it works better in a quiet environment than on a crowded demo floor.
The enhanced background blur studio effect can also be easily found in almost every video chat feature. From Google Meet to Zoom, background blur is not a new technology.
Sure, the NPU makes the background blur feature smarter, able to blur objects in the background or hide people walking in the frame, but that’s not a feature you necessarily need right now.
Copilot Assistant is useful, but it’s not exclusive to Copilot+ PC: You can install Microsoft’s new chatbot on your iPhone if you prefer.
Performance and battery life improvements are undeniable
The performance of most of the Copilot+ PCs, especially the HP EliteBook Ultra, is certainly impressive.
The EliteBook easily kept up with the Apple MacBook Air 13 M3 and even outperformed the MacBook in some benchmarks.
The EliteBook’s average battery life is 16 hours and 1 minute, which puts it in a strong position to rival the MacBook Air.
So the Copilot+ program is by no means a failure, but the AI features aren’t a big reason to upgrade to a new laptop just yet.
