Microsoft is turning basic copy-paste into something much smarter on Windows 11.
The latest PowerToys 0.96 update upgrades the Advanced Paste feature so it can use AI models running directly on your PC instead of always phoning home to the cloud.
That means you can get AI-powered translations and summaries for whatever is on your clipboard while keeping everything local.
Microsoft explains that Advanced Paste can now route requests through its Foundry Local tool or the open source Ollama framework. Both are designed to run AI models on your device’s neural processing unit, so you do not need to buy API credits just to clean up a paragraph or translate a block of text.
The privacy angle is a big part of the appeal, too, since your clipboard data no longer has to leave your machine for these tasks.
Microsoft is not abandoning cloud models, though; it is just giving you more choice. Advanced Paste can now be configured to work with a wider range of online services, including Azure OpenAI, Google’s Gemini and Mistral, where previously it only supported OpenAI.
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That makes it easier to plug the tool into whatever AI setup you or your company already uses, whether you prefer local models, cloud models, or a mix of both. Visual changes get a little attention as well, with a tweak that makes Advanced Paste easier to use at a glance.
The Advanced Paste window now shows the current contents of your clipboard so you can see exactly what you are about to process, and it adds a drop-down menu for choosing which model to use. It’s a relatively minor UI change, but together with the new on-device options, it elevates copy and paste into a flexible AI utility instead of a basic system shortcut.
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