Microsoft has finally delivered an experimental release of the Windows App SDK with artificial intelligence (AI) APIs, marking a significant milestone in its push to bring AI inferencing to edge devices. The new release includes support for the Windows Copilot Runtime, which enables developers to build AI-powered applications that can run on Windows 11 devices, including Arm-powered Copilot+ PCs.

The Windows App SDK is released in three channels: stable, preview, and experimental. The latest experimental release, version 1.7.0-experimental3, is the first to include support for Windows Copilot Runtime APIs, with a stable release expected in the first half of 2025. This new release adds support for a neural processing unit (NPU)-optimized version of Microsoft's small language model (SLM), Phi Silica, which provides many of the capabilities of larger language models while running at lower power.

Phi Silica can respond to prompts, generate text, and provide summaries, and can also reformat text, creating tables, for example. Additionally, other AI tools work with the Windows Copilot Runtime's computer vision models, offering optical character recognition (OCR), image resizing, description, and segmentation. Microsoft is reserving access to these capabilities to code using the Windows App SDK.

Developers can now start building their own AI-powered applications using the Windows App SDK, which will enable them to take advantage of the AI capabilities on edge devices. This move is expected to reduce the load on data centers, as basic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-managed text generation and image processing don't need to run in the cloud. With the Copilot Runtime, we should see consumer AI applications running on PCs, keeping data on local hardware and letting large-scale enterprise AI applications take advantage of Azure's dedicated AI hardware for training and at-scale inferencing.

Getting started with the experimental Windows App SDK release requires a Copilot+ PC running Windows 11, Version 24H2 in either the Windows Insider Beta or Dev channels. Developers need to install the Windows App SDK, configure Visual Studio, and target specific builds of Windows 11 and specific versions of the .NET SDK. While the process is still complex, Microsoft is working to simplify it.

Microsoft has also launched an AI Dev Gallery, a tool that showcases Windows' AI tools and its support for ONNX. The gallery highlights a set of common AI applications, from text operations to audio and video processing, and allows developers to explore and experiment with different models. The gallery is worth exploring, and developers can use it to learn how to use the new AI APIs and what they're good for.

Microsoft's bet on AI-powered PCs is taking time to pay off, but with this first release of Windows' on-device AI APIs, it's time for developers to start learning how to use them. The 1.7 release of the Windows App SDK is "experimental," and Microsoft is encouraging developers to experiment and build new applications that take advantage of the AI capabilities on edge devices.

As the technology continues to evolve, we can expect to see a new generation of desktop applications where AI can be embedded in controls as well as in natural language user interfaces. With the Windows App SDK, Microsoft is bringing AI inferencing to the edge, and it's up to developers to take advantage of this new capability and create innovative applications that change the way we interact with our devices.