How will Cowriter AI work in Windows 11's Notepad? New leak gives us a good idea

Hot on the heels of yesterday's leak of the Cowriter AI functionality for Notepad in Windows 11, we've now got a glimpse of the full interface for this feature.

As flagged up by regular leaker Albacore on X (formerly Twitter), the UI is in place, and while it still feels like placeholders in terms of the implementation, the main options are shown and give us a good flavor of what to expect.

The Notepad user will be able to summon Cowriter and get the AI to rewrite chunks of text in much the same vein as previously seen with Copilot (formerly Bing Chat).

So, you'll be able to have something rewritten, or you can also get the AI to rejig selected content in either a longer or shorter form.

You can choose a tone for Cowriter, too, and we can see the available selection in this latest leak. They comprise of a basic neutral tone, along with formal, casual, inspiration, or humor choices (and indeed pirate - avast, me hearties etc).

There's a selection of self-explanatory format options shown too: default, paragraph, business, academic, poetry.

Elsewhere in Notepad there's another AI-related option in the app's right-click context menu which is 'Explain with Copilot.' That will trigger the broader AI assistant to step in, serving up a query for whatever's currently highlighted.

None of this works right now, of course, but clearly Microsoft is beavering away at developing Cowriter in testing. It's no great surprise that the software giant would bring this capability in for Notepad, mind, as Paint already has Cocreator for working with images in a similar vein.