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What are Windows AI APIs?

Image showing the icons for various Windows AI APIs.

Windows AI Foundry provides a variety of artificial intelligence (AI) features through a suite of Windows AI APIs and hardware-abstracted AI inferencing capabilities enabled through Windows machine learning (ML). The Windows AI APIs enable AI capabilities without the need to find, run, or optimize your own machine learning (ML) model. The models that power Windows AI Foundry run locally on supported Windows 11 devices—including Copilot+ PCs with NPUs, devices with supported GPUs, and devices that meet the recommended CPU specifications—and can run continuously in the background.

Supported hardware

Windows AI APIs are expanding beyond Copilot+ PCs to support a broader range of hardware. The following table shows the current hardware support for each API.

Note

On a Copilot+ PC, supported APIs always run on the NPU. The GPU and CPU columns describe expansion to non-Copilot+ devices — they are not alternative backends you can opt into on a Copilot+ PC.

API NPU (Copilot+ PC) GPU CPU
Phi Silica ✅ Available ✅ Available (select GPUs) ❌ Not supported
Text Recognition (OCR) ✅ Available ❌ Not supported ❌ Not supported
Speech Recognition ✅ Available ❌ Not supported ✅ Available (optional, removable)
Video Super Resolution ✅ Available ❌ Not supported ✅ Available
Image Super Resolution ✅ Available ❌ Not supported ❌ Not supported
Image Description ✅ Available ❌ Not supported ❌ Not supported
Image Segmentation ✅ Available ❌ Not supported ❌ Not supported
Object Erase ✅ Available ❌ Not supported ❌ Not supported
Image Generation ✅ Available (optional, removable) ❌ Not supported ❌ Not supported

Note

GPU support for Phi Silica is currently available on NVIDIA GPUs (RTX 30 series and newer with 6+ GB vRAM). AMD GPU support is coming soon. GPU inference requires Developer Mode to be enabled (Settings > System > For developers) and the latest GPU driver installed directly from the manufacturer (see Phi Silica — GPU driver requirements). Video Super Resolution and Speech Recognition run on any CPU but perform best on devices that meet the recommended specifications (4 physical cores, 3 GHz or higher base clock, 32 MB or more of L3 cache). See the individual API pages for details and a runtime check.

Model availability

The way the underlying AI model reaches a device depends on the API:

  • Phi Silica — On Copilot+ PCs the model is preinstalled on the NPU. On GPU and CPU devices the model is not preinstalled — it is downloaded on demand the first time your app calls EnsureReadyAsync. Downloads can be several GB and run in the background through Windows Update. End users can remove or reinstall the model at Settings > System > AI Components. Apps should check GetReadyState first and show a consent dialog before triggering the download. See Phi Silica — Model availability and download for the recommended UX pattern.
  • AI Image Generation — Runs on the NPU only, but the model is not preinstalled because of its install size. It is downloaded on demand the first time your app calls EnsureReadyAsync, and users can later remove it at Settings > System > AI Components. Apps should check GetReadyState first and show a consent dialog before triggering the download. See AI Image Generation — Model availability and download for the recommended UX pattern.
  • Video Super Resolution — The VSR model ships with the Windows App SDK on every supported hardware path. There is no first-run download, consent step, or removable model. See Video Super Resolution — Recommended CPU specifications.
  • Speech Recognition — On Copilot+ PCs the model is preinstalled on the NPU. On CPU-only devices the model is not preinstalled — it is downloaded on demand the first time your app calls EnsureReadyAsync, and users can later remove it at Settings > System > AI Components. Apps should check GetReadyState first and show a consent dialog before triggering the download on CPU. See Speech Recognition — Model availability and download for the recommended UX pattern.

See the Windows AI APIs with WinUI sample app for how to use Microsoft Foundry on Windows with WinUI.

Important

The following is a list of Windows AI features and the Windows App SDK release in which they are currently supported. See Overview of available APIs later in this topic for brief descriptions.

[Version 2.2.2-experimental9 (June 2026 Experimental)] - Phi Silica on GPU (requires Windows Insider Experimental Channel build)

Version 1.8.0 (1.8.250907003) - Phi Silica (Limited Access Feature), Conversation Summarization (Text Intelligence), Object Erase

Version 1.8 Preview (1.8.0-preview) - LoRA fine-tuning for Phi Silica, Text Rewriter Tone (Text Intelligence)

Private preview - Semantic Search

Version 1.7.1 (1.7.250401001) - All other APIs

Build your first AI-powered Windows app

Tip

To improve accessibility and readability, this page displays still images by default. In some cases, you can click an image to see an animated version.

To build your first Windows app with Visual Studio and some simple Windows AI APIs, just meet the prerequisites and use the provided example code in Get started building an app with Windows AI APIs.

From there, you can jump into short tutorials that build an app leveraging specific Windows AI APIs such as the Phi Silica walthrough, Imaging walthrough and OCR walthrough.

Try the APIs and models on your PC

AI Dev Gallery is a demo app—available from the Microsoft Store—that lets you quickly download, try out, and use Windows AI APIs and models.

Install AI Dev Gallery from the Microsoft Store

In AI Dev Gallery, select the Windows AI APIs tab menu item, then select the Phi Silica sample. If the model is already available on your device, then that sample will run straight away. Otherwise, select Request model to download the model. Once downloaded, that sample will be activated. Learn more about the AI Dev Gallery in What is the AI Dev Gallery?.

Overview of available APIs

Here are a few ready-to-use AI features that you can tap into from your Windows app:

Phi Silica

Similar to Large Language Models (LLM), Phi Silica is a Small Language Model (SLM) developed by Microsoft Research to perform language-processing tasks on a local device (see Get started with Phi Silica). Phi Silica is designed for Windows devices with a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) or a supported GPU, allowing text generation and conversation features to run in a high performance, hardware-accelerated way directly on the device. Phi Silica is not available in China.

An animated gif showing an AI chat prompt reading introduce yourself and a response being generated using the Phi Silica feature.

Try it in AI Dev Gallery

Text recognition

The text recognition APIs enable the recognition of text in an image, and the conversion on a local device of different types of documents (such as scanned paper documents, PDF files, and images captured by a digital camera) into editable and searchable data (see Get started with AI text recognition).

An animated gif showing words in a screenshot being recognized with text overlays that can be copied to a file or clipboard using the text recognition feature.

Try it in AI Dev Gallery

Imaging

Scale and sharpen images (Image Super Resolution), identify objects within an image (Image Object Extractor), generate natural-language descriptions of images (Image Description), and remove objects from images (Object Erase). See Get Started with AI imaging.

Image Super Resolution

The Image Super Resolution APIs enable image sharpening and scaling.

An animated gif showing an image with a mix of words and pictures that is being sharpened and scaled using the Image Super Resolution feature.

Try it in AI Dev Gallery

Also see Image Super Resolution.

Image Object Extractor

The Image Object Extractor APIs enable identifying objects within images.

An animated gif showing a man lifting one foot off the ground, then selecting Remove Background to isolate the image of the man on a white background using the Image Object Extractor feature.

Try it in AI Dev Gallery

Also see Image Object Extractor.

Image Description

The Image Description APIs describes images in natural language.

Note

Image Description features are not available in China.

An animated gif showing a sleeping dog that pops up a description of the image using natural language reading a fluffy, shaggy-haired dog lying down on a couch resting comfortably, using the Image Description feature.

Try it in AI Dev Gallery

Also see Image Description

Object Erase

You can use the Object Erase APIs to remove objects from images.

An animated gif showing a an image where the user is removing objects from using the Object Erase feature.

Try it in AI Dev Gallery

Also see Object Erase

Additional AI features

  • Live Translation (Not yet supported). Help everyone using Windows—including those who are deaf or hard of hearing—better understand audio by viewing captions of spoken content (even when the audio content is in a language that's different from the system's preferred language).

Content moderation

Learn how content is moderated by the Windows AI APIs, and how you can adjust sensitivity filters. See Content safety moderation with the Windows AI APIs.

When utilizing AI features, we recommend that you review: Developing Responsible Generative AI Applications and Features on Windows.

Additional resources

See also

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