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 with DALL-E 3, use plugins, and even get access to 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 grab it for $20 (£19, AU$33) a month.
The problem is that you only get full Copilot integration with Windows 11 and certain Windows 10 PCs. These PCs currently have Copilot with “limited capabilities” in preview mode.
You can always use Copilot in a browser, of course, but it’s nowhere near as good as the fully integrated Windows experience. Well, it just so happens that there’s another solution for integrated AI available for Windows users in the form of Ashampoo AI Assistant.
For $11 (£8, AU$15) a month, Ashampoo gives you access to AI in an app within Windows. It works on Windows 10 (64-bit only) and Windows 11, and has some cool features that set it apart from Copilot (like keyboard shortcuts and macros). The app works with text only, and does so in four main areas: translate & enhance, generate, analyze & summarize, and interactive chat.
Translate and improve
In short, AI Assistant can do everything Copilot can do with text, but is designed to produce specific types of text (Facebook posts, text for website creation, etc.) more efficiently thanks to templates and menus that guide you through the process.
It won’t hit usage limits on the 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 hands for training. With ChatGPT, you need to open an OpenAI account to use the LLM, while AI Assistant doesn’t require you to. It also has keyboard shortcuts to speed up operations, and you can create macros to make it even more efficient.
AI Assistant can expand, improve, shorten, proofread, paraphrase and generate text. It can translate it to most languages, and also use different tones, such as funny or professional. I asked a Russian speaker to check the quality of the translations into Russian, and they seemed satisfied with the results.
I used AI Assist to generate a post for Facebook and Twitter (the app doesn’t call it X) for a blog post I wrote. It worked so well that I could just cut and paste the text, including emojis, into my social media post.
It was very useful to change the tone of the post and regenerate it to see the differences. If you had to generate multiple social media posts per day, AI Assistant would make your life a lot easier.
Stuck in the past
In the ‘Interactive’ section of the app, you can chat with AI Assistant as if it were a chatbot. I wanted to test its knowledge about 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 of them, which is odd considering the latest iOS beta is 18…
Confused, I asked about something more general. “Who is the British prime minister?” The answer was Rishi Sunak. (In case you’re wondering, I’m writing this 25 days after Sir Keir Starmer took over as British prime minister.)
Then I realized that AI Assistant was living in the past. Ask Copilot or ChatGPT these things and it knows the right answers. It turns out that AI Assistant was last updated in October 2023 and it doesn’t appear to have any web search capabilities.
But how about something a little more historical? No problem. “Tell me about the Stoics,” for example, gets you the kind of response you’d expect—a decent description of Stoicism, the ancient Greek philosophy. Ask it to write a Python program that helps you introduce Stoic principles into your life, and it spits out the code without a fuss. Ask it to write you a poem about Stoicism, and you’ll get one.
Finally, there are the image generation aspects… or lack thereof. AI Assistant simply doesn’t have one. Copilot has DALL-E 3 integration, so it can generate a limited number of AI images per day based on your prompts.
In short, Ashampoo AI Assistant fills a gap for someone who has to generate a lot of text every day. The interface is much more geared towards quickly producing content for you than using a free chatbot, but while AI Assistant is clearly capable of all the important tasks that ChatGPT or Copilot can, its knowledge of current events is severely limited in comparison.
AI Assistant certainly has benefits that justify the $11 monthly subscription, especially for heavy AI users who push their limits on free platforms. For casual users, however, the free chatbots or Copilot are more than sufficient.