Right or wrong, Microsoft thinks that one of the big reasons to upgrade to a new Copilot Plus PC is a dedicated key to launch its new AI assistant. Smash that button where trusty right ctrl used to be, and you’ll be treated with a popup chat window for Copilot. Handy, but what if you want to use that key for something else, say launching a better AI model?

I’ve been using the Microsoft Surface Laptop (7th gen) for a couple of months now and am enjoying the Snapdragon X-powered experience for the most part. However, I can probably count the number of times I’ve clicked that Copilot key on my fingers. It’s not that I don’t find AI useful; I use ChatGPT fairly regularly, especially for coding. It’s more that Copilot is, well, just a bit naff by comparison, and why settle for an inferior option?

Tired of the dubious responses, I’ve replaced Copilot with a dedicated ChatGPT key. Here’s how you can do the same.

Before we get into remapping the Copilot key, you’ll need to decide what you want to replace it with. Me, I prefer ChatGPT (even the free version) but you can launch any application or web app using the method outlined below. Since there’s no official ChatGPT application for Windows, I installed the ChatGPT page as an Edge (or Chrome) web app. You could do the same for Google’s Gemini or some other service for which you’d rather use the Copilot key.

You can install any web page as an app via Settings > Apps > Install in Edge or Settings > Cast, Save & Share > Install page as app on Chrome. When installing, make sure to create a desktop shortcut (you can delete it later). If you need to create a new shortcut for an installed app, you can do this under edge://apps or chrome://apps, depending on your browser.

OK, now to replace the Copilot key. Microsoft provides a way to remap keys, but it’s not native to your Windows installation. Instead, you’ll need to grab Microsoft’s PowerToys application. This app enables a huge range of useful Windows extras, including image resizing directly in Explorer, Fancy Zones for managing multiple windows, a RGB color picker, and plenty more. The feature we’re interested in is Keyboard Manager.

Once installed, navigate through the lengthy PowerToys menu to find Keyboard Manager and enable it. At the bottom of the menu, you’ll spot the “Remap a shortcut” button. Open this. Here, we can remap the Copilot button to something new.

Now, the Copilot key isn’t actually a specific function. Instead, it’s simply a shortcut. Pressing the key activates the “Win + Shift(left) + F23” shortcut, so that’s what we need to put into the shortcut field. Scroll through all the options to find them; see the image below. The next step is a bit trickier, as we need to configure launching our application.

First, change the shortcut action to “Run Program.” Next, you need to select the App to launch when we hit the shortcut, which for Edge apps is msedge_proxy.exe in the Edge application folder, and the Start In folder that contains that .exe file. Finally, you must provide arguments, including an important app ID, for launching the specific web app we installed earlier. The best way to do this is to check the ChatGPT shortcut you made on your desktop earlier, separating out the Target field into the App and Args fields. When you’re done, hit OK.

The finished setup should look something like this for an Edge app:

• App: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\msedge_proxy.exe
• Args: --profile-directory=Default --app-id=YOUR_ID_HERE --app-url=https://chatgpt.com/ --app-launch-source=4
• Start in: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application

Of course, you could set this shortcut to launch any application, such as your favorite messaging app, rather than some other AI chatbot, or simply remap the key to a different standard shortcut. You just need to point the remap to the correct application, shortcut configuration, or URI.

As I said earlier, I don’t really like Copilot compared to some of the alternatives out there. Microsoft’s AI experience has its merits, such as image generation via DallE3 built-in and the ability to search the web directly. However, you can find similar capabilities from other services and they are often better in other ways, especially when you can use the latest ChatGPT 4o model for free.

I have a couple of major problems with Copilot that I don’t have with ChatGPT. First, Copilot tends to waffle and give indirect answers to questions when it could be far more specific. Below is a good example; I asked the models to estimate how long a simple sailing adventure might take. Copilot doesn’t provide a suitable answer without further prompting, as it fails to appreciate the question could be theoretical. The overly chatty, faux helpful tone is also an irritating hallmark of Copilot. ChatGPT is far more direct, providing several theoretical answers and showing its math for me to check.

Secondly, Copilot is often terrible at following longer conversations. It can sometimes feel like you’re starting from scratch rather than taking the context of previous messages into account. This is important when, say, modifying a code snippet.

In the example below, I asked both models to help write a very basic Python script to check RSS feeds. I then asked them to suggest alternatives to the common feedparser library that both used in their first code example. ChatGPT provides some proper alternatives, complete with code to implement them because we were already writing code. Copilot instead prattles on about alternative RSS applications such as a Python library for Google News and RSS applications like Inoreaer and Feedly. That’s barely an answer to the question I asked, let alone following our original coding mission.

It got worse for Copiliot once I asked it to “adapt our code to use the bs4 library.” It decided to ignore the code we’d previously worked on in favor of copying something else from the web that was far more complicated and didn’t include some of the tracking features I’d asked for. ChatGPT nailed it, integrating the new library with the existing features and even providing a detailed breakdown of how the new code works compared to the original.

And that’s just a small overview of the litany of issues I’ve had with Copilot compared to the far more competent ChatGPT. So sorry Copilot key, you’ve been replaced, and I doubt I’ll be coming back any time soon.