AI’s relentless spread into every corner of our digital lives is starting to feel a bit much. As if the all-encompassing Copilot wasn’t enough, Microsoft has now added an AI feature to the most unexpected of places: Notepad.
If you’ve never opened Notepad before, you’re not alone. It’s Microsoft’s simplest word processor—no bells and whistles, just a blank slate for quick notes or basic text editing. It’s the kind of app you wouldn’t expect to get AI features.
But here we are: Notepad is introducing an AI tool called Rewrite. This feature lets you highlight text and adjust it to suit your needs, whether that’s lengthening it or changing its tone. It’s a surprising upgrade for such a straightforward app.
Notepad isn’t the only classic Microsoft app getting the AI treatment. Microsoft Paint is also receiving two AI-powered features: Generative Fill and Generative Erase. With Generative Fill, you can type a prompt, and the AI generates an image based on it, a feature becoming increasingly familiar in the AI world. Generative Erase, on the other hand, allows you to point to an object in an image, and the AI will erase it for you, making image editing smarter and faster.
With Rewrite in Notepad and these new tools in Paint, Microsoft is adding more AI-powered capabilities across its apps, building on the recent launch of Windows Copilot.
