Microsoft is adding a dedicated AI key to its keyboards
We’ll begin this program as we have never done before at Marketplace, with a riddle written by ChatGPT:
A daily stage, where fingers dance,
A symphony of clicks, by chance.
Each press a step, in a ceaseless ballet,
Crafting words and worlds, in endless array.
What am I?
If you guessed keyboard, a gold star for you. Why the riddle? Because Microsoft announced Thursday it would be adding a new artificial intelligence key to PC keyboards — one tap and the key opens up Microsoft Copilot, the company’s AI helper.
It’s the first time Microsoft has made a major change to PC keyboards since 1994, before the internet really took off, before smartphones. Which says something about how humans — and the economy — adapt to new technologies.
Jared Spool worked for a company in the early 1980s that designed some of the first PC keyboards.
“People wanted to take what was the best of typewriter technology at the time and turn it into a keyboard that would be comfortable to be use and would basically endure the test of time,” he said.
Those early prototypes Spool worked on had some now pretty antiquated features: a “do” key that ultimately didn’t do all that much and a “help” key that proved not so helpful.
But the inverted T arrow pad and the QWERTY layout and the rest of the basics? Check your laptop (or iPhone) or search for something by name on Netflix.
“No one has come up with anything that has been remarkably better,” Spool said.
Part of the reason is just user inertia. We spent all those hours with Mavis Beacon …
“Humans evolve at a very slow rate. Technology evolves at a very high rate,” said Per Ola Kristensson, a professor of interactive systems engineering. He researches AI at the University of Cambridge.
And even though AI is really good at speech recognition, Kristensson said for work, we’ll still be mostly using keyboards to boss AI around — not our voices.
“You can speak very quickly, that’s true,” he said. “But you probably can’t think of good original thoughts that quickly.”
A lot of why Microsoft is adding the AI key is symbolism. It’s telling the world, “Hey, you should use this, so we’re gonna put it pretty close to the space bar.”
“The last change we did is we put the Windows key on the keyboard because we said, ‘Wow, Windows is going to change how people use computers,'” said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s chief consumer marketing officer. “Now we’re putting the Copilot key 30 years later, that’s how profound it will be.”
Jared Spool, the OG keyboard designer, is skeptical.
He’s a bit concerned about where this AI key is located, where the menu key used to be, pretty close to the arrow pad.
“I 100% predict that a year from now, most of the conversation around this button will be how it’s inconveniently placed,” he said.
And if you hit that AI key by accident? Well, there’s not a help key around to figure out what to do next.