The big picture: Desktop users will swear they’ve been in situations where they had to desperately search through emails, browser histories, and file folders trying to find that one thing they vaguely remember seeing or working on a few days prior. It’s frustrating, but Microsoft may have cracked this problem with a new feature called Recall.
Launching for the upcoming Copilot+ PCs powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips, Recall is essentially an all-seeing eye that keeps tabs on everything you do on your computer. It then presents a scrollable timeline you can search through, using AI. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described the feature as an upgrade over traditional keyword search, dubbing it was “semantic search over all your history.”
Satya Nadella says Windows PCs will have a photographic memory feature called Recall that will remember and understand everything you do on your computer by taking constant screenshots pic.twitter.com/Gubi4DGHcs
– Tsarathustra (@tsarnick) May 20, 2024
“It’s not just about any document. We can recreate moments from the past,” he said. He also provided a glimpse into what happens behind the scenes when the feature’s turned on. Essentially, Windows takes screenshots of your screen constantly. It then uses a generative AI model right on the device along with the NPU to process all that data, including photos.
As an example, a Microsoft executive used Recall during a demo at its preview event this week to instantly pull up her recent Pinterest searches for “blue dress” just by saying that phrase out loud. With a couple more details like “sequined lace” and “for Abuelita,” Recall homed in on the exact item she’d been eyeing.
As you can tell from the demo above, the level of data captured seems pretty vast. Recall’s timeline lets you scroll through a visual recreation of everything you’ve done, seeing past browser sessions, video meetings, you name it. Meetings get automatically transcribed and translated too, thanks to Live Captions tech also integrated into Recall.
All this does sound kind of similar to the Cortana-powered Timeline feature Microsoft abandoned in Windows 10 a few years back. Despite its promise, the feature never caught on. And with Cortana’s looming deprecation, it probably made sense to axe the whole thing at the time. But cut to now, with Copilot’s improved generative AI powers, Microsoft thought it would revive the feature in a new avatar.
Of course, there may be some privacy implications here, too. Microsoft’s laying those to rest by claiming all Recall data stays local and private on your PC, and you can pause or delete logging as needed. However, it added that Recall won’t proactively hide sensitive stuff like passwords or payment details.
“Your snapshots are yours; they stay locally on your PC. You can delete individual snapshots, adjust and delete ranges of time in Settings, or pause at any point right from the icon in the System Tray on your Taskbar. You can also filter apps and websites from ever being saved. You are always in control with privacy you can trust,” notes Microsoft.
There are some hardware limitations as well. Recall requires one of the freshly announced Copilot+ PCs with a special neural processing unit for the heavy AI lifting involved. And you’ll need a decent chunk of storage too – Microsoft recommends a minimum of 256GB of space, with 25GB allocated to Recall out of the box for roughly 3 months of snapshots.
Performance is another open question. Could having an AI assistant perpetually logging all your activities affect battery life? We’ll have to wait for real-world tests to know for certain.
