The first preview of Microsoft’s AI tool Recall which faced a major security and privacy backlash in the weeks after it was unveiled in May this year, is now finally available for Copilot Plus PCs.
Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel can install a new build of Windows 11 that includes Recall and Click to Do — a feature that’s similar to Google’s Circle to Search.
The preview is initially only available on Qualcomm-powered Copilot Plus PCs, with support for Intel- and AMD-powered Copilot Plus PCs expected to follow soon.
Recall takes screenshots of almost everything you do on a Copilot Plus PC. It makes this information searchable and therefore easy to recall a memory or retrace your steps.
If you enable snapshots to be recorded by Recall, you can use the Recall app to search for what you were working on previously using natural language queries.
There is also a scrollable timeline so you can skip back to a specific date and find the apps or websites you were using.
Recall’s search results use AI to match text and visual elements from the screen captures.
The reason that Microsoft delayed the rollout of Recall which was first unveiled in May was because security analysts demonstrated how easily someone could steal the recalls saved on a Windows machine and access that data which was stored encryption-free on a target device.
It forced Microsoft to say in June that it would launch the Recall feature in Copilot Plus PCs as an opt-in feature, giving customers the choice of whether or not they’d like to have that feature.
Microsoft says that you can control what snapshots are saved and easily delete them. The company also allows for the exclusion of apps and websites from Recall.
Recall also automatically detects sensitive information like credit card details, passwords, and personal ID numbers and does not save those snapshots.
The company says that it won’t have access to any Recall snapshots, and they’re not sent to the cloud or used to train Microsoft’s AI models. “We do not send your snapshots off your PC to Microsoft or third parties, and don’t use them for training purposes,” says Microsoft’s Windows Insider team. “Microsoft can’t access the keys to view your encrypted data, so we can’t restore your snapshots if you remove Windows Hello or restore your snapshots if you need to reset your PC or move to a new PC.”
To use Recall, Windows Hello is used to confirm your presence and access the feature, and it also requires BitLocker and Secure Boot — both of which should be enabled already on a Copilot Plus PC.
The Click to Do feature within Recall meanwhile is designed to recognise text and images in Recall snapshots so you can use AI-powered actions on them like copying text or saving images out of old snapshots.
Click to Do in Recall showing image actions on a highlighted image
Click to Do will eventually also work outside of Recall by hitting the Windows key on a keyboard and left-clicking on a mouse to see an interactive overlay appear on your screen. This interface will let you select images or text to perform clickable actions.
In the future, you’ll also be able to use Click to Do on things like a YouTube video to perform a visual search on an item that appears in the video using Bing.
