Microsoft’s Phone Connection, which lets Copilot on Windows connect to your phone, is now rolling out to everybody. Windows Latest got this feature working on our PC and tested out everything that Phone Connection offers.

AI assistants work well when they are multiplatform. That’s because our life isn’t stuck just to one device. We use PCs for work, tablets for entertainment, and smartphones for almost everything.

The smartphone OS with the biggest market share is Android; for PCs, it’s Windows. Both have their own AI assistants.

Google is quickly bundling in Gemini with all new Android smartphones, and Microsoft infamously made it mandatory for all new PCs to come with a Copilot key that, when clicked, used to open a web view version of Copilot. But now it’s a more native app than ChatGPT.

While the new Copilot app doesn’t have a lot to offer, Windows Latest found that Microsoft added a new toggle in the Settings menu that says “Phone Connection”.

As per Microsoft’s support document spotted by Windows Latest, this Copilot setting is being gradually rolled out and was planned to be generally available by the end of February 2025.

So, what is Phone Connection?

Phone Connection is Microsoft’s answer to making Copilot more personalized and truly cross-platform with access to rich data, like messages and contacts, straight from your Android phone. It comes as an update to a previously released feature in Copilot.

In May 2024, Microsoft updated Copilot web with a Phone toggle that gave users the ability to look up contact information from their Android phone and also read and send text messages directly from the Copilot interface.

The feature was called Phone Plugin but it became temporarily unavailable at a certain point as it was a server-side update to Copilot web. In our testing, Windows Latest found that Phone Plugin didn’t work as expected. While it could fetch contact information, sending texts didn’t work.

Now, Microsoft is restoring Phone Plugin by renaming it to Phone Connection, with more features, and adding it to the native Copilot app.

At the moment, Phone Connection is not available in the Copilot web version and Microsoft hasn’t explicitly mentioned when it will arrive. However, the support document mentions to “Visit copilot.microsoft.com or open the Copilot app” to enable the feature, so it might be coming soon.

What can you do with Phone Connection?

According to Microsoft, Phone Connection can boost your productivity by giving you the ability to execute some common phone tasks right from Copilot interface, like seeing and sending messages, setting alarms and timers, and using the navigation feature in your phone maps.

Well, Windows Latest tested all the features, and here’s what we found.

First, I gave Copilot a prompt to set a 25-minute timer for meditation. Surely enough Copilot accepted it, and I got a notification alert on my phone as well.

But the catch is that Copilot asks me to check my phone and confirm the notification to get started. So I checked my phone and indeed the timer didn’t start. Only when I clicked the notification did the timer start, which defeats the whole purpose of asking Copilot to set a timer without me lifting the Phone.

Note that I have already given all permissions to Link to Windows on my phone. So for timers, I think it’s better to set them on your PC itself, after all, we do have a good Clock app on Windows 11.

Being disappointed, I then asked Copilot to set an alarm for 6 am tomorrow.

Unfortunately, the same thing happened again. Copilot asked me to confirm the alarm from my phone.

Sadly, I can’t put an alarm on my PC because I don’t sleep with it!!!

Undeterred, I asked Copilot if I had any unread messages, and Copilot did reply with some messages that I swear I already deleted from my phone many days ago. This could easily be a syncing issue between Phone Link and Link to Windows. So, restarted my phone and asked Copilot if there were any new messages.

This time, Copilot managed to show me some recent messages. However, the messages it showed were not the latest. Even the Phone Link app showed the latest messages.

After this, I asked for the contact details of a person and luckily Copilot got this one right.

Then I asked if I got any messages from a particular contact (I actually had one unread message from this contact). Copilot managed to show me messages from this contact but failed to show the latest one.

Naturally what I wanted to do next was to ask Copilot to send a message. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get this working. I tried asking Copilot to send messages to multiple contacts and all I got was a timed-out message.

So, I decided to ask Copilot if it knew that it could send messages, and funnily enough I got a reply saying that it wished it could send messages. We’re on the same boat here Copilot…

Finally, I asked Copilot to locate a shopping mall nearby on my phone. As expected, a notification came from Link to Windows, and when I clicked it, it opened the Maps app to show me some nearby shopping centers.

If you have a Samsung phone with Android 14 or higher, you’ll have access to a couple more features. You can start navigation in Google Maps by just saying something like navigate to the shopping mall, and you can also cancel a timer or an alarm.

This isn’t surprising as Link to Windows also has many more additional features for Samsung phones.

So, what is the current state of Phone Connection in Copilot? It’s not ready yet, but the idea is still promising. This is like the first year of Phone Link (Your Phone back then). But Phone Link now works flawlessly for me, so chances are that Microsoft will fix things soon.

But, this does beg the question, can’t we already do some of these with the Phone Link app on our PC?

Comparing Phone Connection with Phone Link PC App

Phone Link is a powerful app that acts as a proper bridge between your phone and PC. You can make calls, send messages, see pictures, share files, see and interact with notifications, and a lot more.

But in an ideal world, we should be able to do these things directly through Windows, without having to use a separate app. I think Phone Connection is the beginning of that.

As a regular user of Phone Link, I feel I’m faster at sending a message from Phone Link rather than Copilot. But what Phone Connection brings to the table is the ability to use natural language to do stuff on your phone, through your PC.

While testing the feature, I showed my friend how to use Phone Connection and he was blown away by how he could set an alarm on his phone by using his PC. He never used Phone Link, but the possibility of sending me a text message from his Android phone using natural language on his Windows PC caught him off guard.

That’s exactly what Microsoft is trying to do here. An AI assistant is only as good as the amount of personal information it has access to. Even though Microsoft is pushing Copilot into all its products, what it still lacks is access to your personal data.

So, imagine a person who already uses Gemini or Siri, if they get to use Copilot, and see that it can help them get more work done on their PC while letting them do stuff on their phone, Copilot will be seen as the only multi-platform AI assistant that they can use on all their devices.

Of course, we’ll need deeper Copilot + Phone Link integrations for that.

As of now, there are no signs of Copilot in the Phone Link app, the only major update we expect is for Phone Link to get Start menu integration. Maybe in the future, we will see an update where Copilot gets direct access to your phone’s notifications and generates a summary of the notifications.

How to get Phone Connection on your PC?

If you are already familiar with Phone Link and Link to Windows, all you need to do is update them both and open the Copilot app on your PC.

Open Account on the bottom left side, click Settings, and you’ll see the Phone connection setting with your phone’s name as it is on the Link to Windows app.

If you’re new to all this, the steps are fairly simple.

On your Android device, you need to install the Link to Windows app and sign in with the Microsoft account you have on your PC. You’ll be prompted for some setup steps that will connect Phone Link on your PC and Link to Windows on your phone.

Then on your PC, you can directly sign in to the Copilot App or copilot.microsoft.com with the same Microsoft Account. Now, go to Profile > Account in Copilot and check if Phone Connection is turned on.

Phone Connection is currently only supported on Android devices. However, you’ll see only the most recently linked Android device in the Copilot settings.

On the flip side, if you don’t want to give Copilot access to your phone’s data, you can turn it off by going to Profile > Account and clicking the toggle.

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