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Offline speech recognition (using an open weights model like Whisper) is a good example of a feature that you can run on your NPU.

Sure, but it's something you can run on the NPU, not something you must run on the NPU. Whisper will run just fine on your CPU or GPU as well - as will the decades of offline speech recognition tools before.

So what's the actual feature? Slightly higher performance? Slightly lower latency? Slightly longer battery life? And that for something most people are rarely - if ever - going to use?

The battery life, if you use enough AI, is the main feature.

MS required the NPU to run local language models and the models are used for various AI features like live captions.

Live captions on what?

Any audio?

Thankfully some other programs ignore MS and do perfectly good live captions on the CPU, even if that CPU is over a decade old.

they weren't for you /s