Microsoft PowerToys will soon add on-device support for Phi Silica. Microsoft called that small language model (SLM) “small but mighty” when announcing it in 2024. Now, that model is available for Advanced Paste in the latest PowerToys preview.
Advanced Paste is a utility in PowerToys that formats content from your clipboard. It supports several formats, including plain text, markdown, and JSON. You can also use it to extract text from images using OCR and transcode audio and video files.
When first launched, Advanced Paste required an OpenAI API key, but PowerToys later added support for other models. Azure OpenAI, OpenAI, Gemini, and Mistral are cloud services that work with Advanced Paste. Foundry Local and Ollama both work with the feature locally.
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Phi Silica is now available as an option for local AI processing in the latest preview.
While you may not have heard of Phi Silica, you’ve likely heard of tools it powers if you have a Copilot+ PC. Click to Do and on-device rewriting in Word and Outlook are powered by Phi Silica.
Phi Silica uses the NPU of a device, which helps with efficiency.
The GitHub page for PowerToys lists all the changes in the latest preview. Here are the highlights from the same page:
PowerToys v0.101.2211.0 Highlights
- Advanced Paste: Added an on-device Phi Silica provider and more per-action AI customization options.
- Command Palette: Improved dialog handling, icon loading, memory cleanup, theme behavior, and dock performance monitoring.
- Window management: Improved shutdown behavior across FancyZones, Grab And Move, and Always On Top, and made Always On Top borders render solidly at full opacity.
- Keyboard Manager: Fixed the elevated Run Program browse flow in the new editor.
- Mouse Jump: Moved Mouse Jump to the newer WinUI app architecture and packaged its new binaries into signed release builds.
- Settings: Added an update channel selector and a guided Bug Report flow with progress and a GitHub shortcut.
- Quick Accent: Made press-and-hold activation cancel cleanly so the picker appears only when intended.
- Preview releases: Added dedicated preview-release versioning and update-channel support so preview builds can be published and tested independently from stable releases.
PowerToys has a growing library of utilities, so there’s a lot to look at in the latest preview even if you do not care about AI. Command Palette will perform better and Window management has been improved across FancyZones, Grab And Move, and Always On Top.
Mouse Jump being moved to WinUI modernizes the utility and gets it in line with Microsoft’s push to use WinUI across Windows.
WinUI 3 is the native framework for Windows. Microsoft is moving several key components of the OS to WinUI 3 and rebuilding that framework.
The latest preview of PowerToys also makes it possible for preview builds to be published and tested independently.
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