"If it's this easy, why don't more Windows apps use a PC's NPU?" — Microsoft MVP demonstrates how he added meaningful AI to an app in just 10 minutes

AI PCs featuring a specialized Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for on-device AI work are becoming ever more common. While Copilot+ tools built into Windows 11 are a primary use case for your PC's NPU, last week I put together a list of third-party apps that also make good use of the AI hardware.

In that piece, I failed to mention one important aspect of AI apps. As pointed out by 12-year Microsoft MVP Lance McCarthy in response to my app roundup, Microsoft's Windows AI APIs "make using the NPU reaaally easy."

As it turns out, McCarthy was one of the first developers to use Windows AI APIs in the Windows App SDK (a unified set of APIs and tools used to build apps for Windows 11).

McCarthy provided a link to his blog post explaining exactly how you, too, can start using Windows AI APIs in your app development. All with "no cloud APIs or fees, no REST calls, and no custom onnx model."

As explained in the blog, apps developed under these conditions come with one requirement: that the user has a Copilot+ PC with a capable NPU inside. Makes sense, and as I explained above, there's a good chance you're already using a capable AI PC if you purchased a new laptop in the past year or so.

McCarthy calls out several AI tools that are "available out-of-the-box". Phi Silica is a local language model that offers many Large Language Model (LLM) features, albeit at a local level running on an NPU.

AI Text Recognition, aka optical character recognition (OCR), is another tool that can identify characters, words, lines, and text boundaries, allowing the conversion of documents into searchable text.

AI Imaging is a set of tools that can scale and sharpen images, give image descriptions, extract objects from images, and erase objects within images. And, last but not least, Windows Studio Effects can be fairly easily implemented in your app to improve camera and audio quality.

Adding AI to a Windows app is way easier than I thought

McCarthy's blog highlights an example of how these tools can be implemented with great effect during app development.

McCarthy is the developer behind the Xkcd Viewer app, available directly from the Microsoft Store or from GitHub. Realizing that the app, which lets you view any xkcd comics with saving and sharing features, wasn't great for the visually-impaired, McCarthy added AI-powered image descriptions to the app.

👉 Get started building an app with Windows AI APIs

As he explains, simply adding text readouts doesn't exactly convey the proper message in a comic like xkcd that relies so heavily on artwork.

McCarthy adds that the modification took only about 10 minutes, yet adds a ton of value. There's a lot more information about the dev process in McCarthy's blog, and it's a great read even if you're a dev dummy like yours truly.

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