Windows 11 has a smart feature called “Suggested actions,” but it’s going away as it’s now considered deprecated by Microsoft. That’s according to the recently updated support document, which confirms Microsoft has deprecated one of the interesting and nice ideas called “Suggested actions.”
“Suggested actions that appear when you copy a phone number or future date in Windows 11 are deprecated and will be removed in a future Windows 11 update,” the company noted in a support document updated earlier this December and noticed by Windows Latest today.
Microsoft says it plans to remove the Suggested actions feature in 2025 via a cumulative update, but how many of you used the feature or even realized Windows 11 was able to suggest actions?
For those unaware, Microsoft added Suggested actions to Windows 11 in 2022. Suggested actions appear when you copy a phone number or date, but it was not available for most users until 2023.
How does the Suggested actions feature work in Windows 11? In our tests, we observed that the “smart” feature, which does not use AI, tries to guess what you may want to do based on the text selection.
For example, if you open Teams, highlight a date, Suggested actions will assume that you want to create a calendar event, and it will offer that suggestion.
Not bad, right? The idea was definitely interesting, and Suggested actions had a good future if Microsoft had correctly figured out how and where to integrate it. With Suggested actions, Microsoft hoped that it would predict your next move and reduce the number of steps it takes to work around Microsoft apps.
Like in the case of Teams, if you copy a date and you’re suggested to create an event in Outlook, you’ll most likely use the option. Other use cases could have been copying the date to an email, but that was something Microsoft planned to cover in a future version of Suggested actions.
The idea was not just limited to calendars, events, or dates. Microsoft also allows you to see Suggested actions when copying a phone number. You can either call the number or learn more about it on Bing.
Windows Latest previously learned that Microsoft wanted to use machine learning and local models to make Suggested actions more interesting, but the idea is now canned.
Suggested actions just never worked, and it was a mess when it did show up
The biggest catch with Suggested actions, which is still available in Windows 11, is that it’s a hit or miss.
It doesn’t show up most of the time, and even when it does, it shows up where it shouldn’t or the integration is broken (does not open Calendar).
“Suggested actions on copy does not work for copying phone numbers,” one of the users noted in Feedback Hub.
Does that mean no one had access to the Suggested actions? That’s not true, but even those with access to the feature complained of some issues.
For example, one user noted that they want Suggested actions on copy to pop up when they’re working with dates in Excel.
Microsoft has no plans to make suggested actions better. In fact, as mentioned at the outset, Microsoft has confirmed a future release of Windows 11 will remove Suggested actions, and there are no plans to add a similar feature.