Microsoft made a plethora of announcements related to Windows on Arm and AI at its Build conference event on Monday. Besides new Snapdragon X Elite-powered Surface devices, what caught people’s attention was the announcement of an upcoming AI feature in Windows 11 Recall.
What’s Windows 11’s Recall feature and how it works
From web browsing to running apps, Recall will record all your activities on your PCs, except when you’re browsing something in incognito mode, by taking snapshots of what you’re doing every few seconds. These snapshots will be saved on your PC hard drive for viewing. That said, it’s not only about viewing the snapshots. It’ll also let you interact with the content.
In simple words, Recall will take a bunch of screenshots of what you’re working on your PC and create a searchable database, enabling you to search with natural language about what you were working on a few hours ago.
Recall is an AI feature, so it is much more than taking screenshots. It has some advanced algorithms to understand what the content is about. So, for example, if you worked on a document but can’t recall the name of the file, you can simply ask Recall to find the snapshot of the document you were working on a few hours ago. Remember, all of this AI processing is happening locally and not in the cloud.
However, it’ll store information not older than three months. The default storage allocation is 25GB for a PC with 256GB of storage, but you’ll be able to modify it from the Windows Settings app.
When will Recall feature be available for Windows 11
Microsoft is currently testing Recall in Windows 11, so it isn’t available for users at the moment. The Recall capability will first be available to Copilot+ PCs, powered by Snapdragon X Elite chips. It’ll also be available through a Windows update for non-Snapdragon PCs. However, Microsoft hasn’t specified when it’ll be rolled out.
