Microsoft's AI Recall Feature Is A Search Engine For Everything You've Ever Done On Your PC

At a Monday event focused on the future of Windows and Surface, Microsoft announced a slew of new features that will be enabled through the new Copilot Runtime, which is a native AI layer in the Windows operating system. Among them is Recall, a search tool that uses multimodal AI with natural language processing to find anything you have done on your PC. Microsoft has made a lot of mistakes over the years, and Recall will either join the ranks or revolutionize local search as we know it.

The sheer breadth of what is now searchable on your Windows PC with Recall is what makes the feature so astounding. Far from being a mere index of file names, clear text, and metadata like a traditional Windows search, Recall can do everything from find a particular slide in a PowerPoint presentation to finding a particular picture of a dress based on a natural language description of the item — both demos showed off onstage by Microsoft representatives. You can even search through video calls, chats, and other past activities, even if you can't remember the precise language.

Finally, there will be a scrollable timeline containing the sum of Recall's pachyderm memory, sort of similar to the Timeline feature from Windows 10 but with a lot more information. All of this is made possible by the new Microsoft Copilot Runtime, a native layer of Windows that controls AI in new ARM PCs. Speaking of which, should you wish to use Recall, you'll be out of luck until you upgrade your computer.

The new Recall feature on Windows is impressive, but concerns related to both technicality and security abound. Users may wonder whether this is one of those increasingly prevalent AI features that listen in on your conversations and log your activity, hauling troves of personal data back to their company. However, Microsoft claims that the feature will run locally, using new, AI-focused processors to do so. Recall will log pretty much everything you do on your PC, with Microsoft claiming it's all stored on-device. But that local storage and processing wouldn't be possible without NPUs (neural processing units) inside the all new ARM64 chips from Qualcomm. If you want Recall, you'll first need a new PC running on one of the new processors. At the time of writing, that includes the brand-new Microsoft Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, with upcoming models from other major PC manufacturers.

New, ARM64-based AI processors from Qualcomm were a major focus of Microsoft's Monday presentation. The Snapdragon X Elite chip is powering AI on a new generation of Windows devices that follow Apple's lead by consolidating everything to an SoC. Microsoft announced their own Surface laptops and tablets equipped with the Snapdragon X Elite and noted that further models will be coming from Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, and other hardware partners. ARM systems will power potentially useful features like Recall and other AI tasks, but since there may be a lot of app incompatibility in the early days, it's unclear whether they can replace x86-64 platforms in the short run. Such a lack of optimized apps were a contributing factor in the failure of Microsoft's push into ARM with Windows RT over a decade ago, but this time Adobe and other companies are on board.