Microsoft is unveiling Recall, a revolutionary AI-powered feature for Windows 11’s Copilot Plus PCs.
This innovative tool is a digital memory, meticulously tracking your activities across apps, websites, documents, and even live meeting transcripts. With Recall, you can effortlessly search for anything you’ve encountered on your PC, from a specific image on Pinterest to a line in a PowerPoint presentation. By harnessing the power of AI, Recall transforms your Windows 11 experience, making information retrieval seamless and intuitive.
To use Recall on Windows, you’ll need a Copilot+ PC that supports 40 TOPs NPU, a Snapdragon X chip, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage.
There are also minimum storage requirements on PCs to use Recall, as pointed out in the feature’s FAQs page:
The minimum hard drive space needed to run Recall is 256 GB, and 50 GB of space must be available. The default allocation for Recall on a device with 256 GB will be 25 GB, which can store approximately 3 months of snapshots. You can increase the storage allocation for Recall in your PC Settings. Old snapshots will be deleted once you use your allocated storage, allowing new ones to be stored.
Microsoft says the feature will roll out with support for only some languages, which will be English, Chinese (simplified), French, German, Japanese, and Spanish.
You can control what information Recall can capture, and Microsoft says the AI works at the hardware level and keeps all data stored locally on your device.
“Recall leverages your personal semantic index, built and stored entirely on your device,” reads a new announcement from Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi.
“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.”
Recall won’t take snapshots of InPrivate web browsing sessions in Microsoft Edge and DRM-protected content, either, says Microsoft, but it doesn’t “perform content moderation” and won’t actively hide sensitive information like passwords and financial account numbers.
