Microsoft is upgrading its Advanced Paste tool in PowerToys for Windows 11, letting you use on-device AI models to power some of its features. With the 0.96 update, you can route requests through Microsoft’s Foundry local tool or the open-source Olama, both of which run AI models on your device’s neural processing unit (NPU) instead of connecting to the cloud.
This means you won’t need to purchase API credits to perform certain tasks, like having AI translate or summarizing text copied to your clipboard. Plus, you can keep your data on your device.
With support for on-device AI, you can now configure Advanced Paste to work with many other online models, including Azure OpenAI, Gemini, and Mistral. This tool previously supported only OpenAI.
There’s also a new design change to Advanced Paste, as it now shows your current clipboard contents and includes a model selection drop-down menu.