Thanks to Microsoft integrating Copilot into Windows, we’re all familiar with AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Copilot is one of the most feature-rich chatbots out there, even if you stick with the free version. You can use Copilot to search the web using voice, text, and images, you can generate AI images using DALL-E 3, use plugins, and even access GPT 4-Turbo during off-peak hours. If you want more, including priority access to GPT-4 Turbo and Copilot integration with the full Microsoft Office suite, you can get it for $20 (£19, AU$33) a month.
The problem is that you only get full Copilot integration with Windows 11 and select PCs running Windows 10, which currently have Copilot with “limited capabilities” in a preview mode.
Of course, you can always use Copilot in a browser, but it's not as good as the fully integrated Windows experience. Well, it turns out there's another solution for built-in AI available for Windows users: Ashampoo AI Assistant.
For $11 (£8, AU$15) a month, Ashampoo gives you access to AI in an app inside Windows. It runs on Windows 10 (64-bit only) and Windows 11, and has some nice features that set it apart from Copilot (like keyboard shortcuts and macros). The app only works with text, and does so in four main areas: translation and enhancement, generation, analysis and summarization, and interactive chat.
Translate and improve
In a nutshell, AI Assistant can do everything Copilot can with text, but it's set up to be more efficient at producing specific types of text (Facebook posts, text for website creation, etc.) thanks to templates and menus that guide you through the process.
It doesn’t hit the usage limits of GPT-4o (the large language model or LLM that many chatbots are based on), has faster response times, and keeps your data out of OpenAI’s scope for training. With ChatGPT, you need to open an OpenAI account to use its LLM, while AI Assistant doesn’t require you to do so. It also has keyboard shortcuts to help speed up operations, and you can create macros to make it even more efficient.
AI Assistant can expand, enhance, shorten, correct, paraphrase, and generate text. It can translate into most languages, using different tones, such as funny or professional. I asked a Russian speaker to check the quality of its Russian translations, and he seemed satisfied with the results.
I used AI Assist to generate a Facebook and Twitter post (the app doesn't call it X) for a blog I'd written, and it did a good enough job that I could cut and paste the text, complete with emojis, directly into my social media post.
Changing the tone of the post and regenerating it to see the differences was very useful. If you needed to generate multiple social media posts a day, AI Assistant would make your life much easier.
Stuck in the past
The “Interactive” section of the app is where you can talk to AI Assistant as if it were a chatbot. I wanted to test its knowledge on something that happened very recently, so I asked it to “tell me about the latest Apple iOS beta.” It told me that iOS 17 was the latest beta and that it was packed with cool features and described a few, which is odd since the latest iOS beta is version 18…
Confused, I asked something a little more general. “Who is the British Prime Minister?” Rishi Sunak replied. (In case you’re wondering, I’m writing this 25 days after Sir Keir Starmer took office as British Prime Minister.)
That's when I realized that AI Assistant was living in the past. Ask Copilot or ChatGPT and it will know the right answers. It turned out that AI Assistant was last updated in October 2023 and it doesn't seem to have web search capabilities.
But how about something a little more historical? No problem. “Tell me about the Stoics,” for example, gets the kind of response you’d expect: a decent overview of Stoicism, the ancient Greek philosophy. Ask him to write a Python program to help introduce Stoic principles into your life and he’ll deliver it without a hitch. Ask him to write you a poem about Stoicism and you’ll get it.
Finally, there are the imaging aspects… or lack thereof. AI Assistant simply doesn’t have any. Copilot has DALL-E 3 integration, so it can generate a limited number of AI images per day from your input.
In short, Ashampoo AI Assistant fills a gap for someone who needs to generate a lot of text each day. Its interface is much more tailored to producing content for you quickly than that of a free chatbot, but while AI Assistant is clearly capable of performing all the core tasks that ChatGPT or Copilot can, its awareness of current events is very limited in comparison.
AI Assistant has clear advantages that justify the $11 monthly subscription, especially for AI-heavy users who have outgrown the free platforms, but for casual users, free chatbots, or Copilot, will meet their needs.
