One of the biggest success stories from the Microsoft Garage division has been Journal. You may remember last year, the writing app arrived as a new journal-taking app. Well, now the tool is graduating to Microsoft Journal, a full official Microsoft app for Windows 11. And to celebrate, a bunch of new features are landing on the service.
As mentioned, Journal was developed within Microsoft Garage. This is the company’s skunkworks division that allows employees from different Microsoft businesses to collaborate outside of their primary work.
Last year, the Garage rolled out Journal with a demo.
The app is a reimagining of the older Journal app. users get an ink-first experience that promotes the use of digital pens like Microsoft’s own Surface Pen. The new Microsoft Journal also uses AI to automatically categorize notes and enhance other features.
Windows 11
One of the selling points is simply this is an efficient Journal app for Windows, while most similar apps are mobile-specific. As Microsoft Journal arrives as a full product on Windows 11, there are new features available.
Taken user data (without seeing actual content), Microsoft Garage says 59% of documents edited within Journal were PDF format, and the other 41% were blank documents. Microsoft is tweaking the AI to be more efficient when recognizing editing.
Stevie Bathiche, Technical Fellow and leader of Microsoft’s Applies Sciences, said:
“We are entering an age of computer-aided reasoning, where AI accelerates the tasks that people do, and makes us all more productive. Journal shows just how powerful an experience can be when software anticipates your intentions. This is just the beginning.”
Tip of the day: Need to create an ad-hoc network from your PC? In our tutorial we show you how to easily create a shareable wireless internet connection in Windows as a free WIFI hotspot.