Windows 11 Recall AI feature will record everything you do on your PC

Microsoft has announced a new AI-powered feature for Windows 11 called 'Recall,' which records everything you do on your PC and lets you search through your historical activities.

Recall works like a photographic memory for your PC, letting you access everything you've seen or done on your computer in an organized way using queries in your native language.

With Recall, you can scroll through your timeline to find content from any app, website, or document you had opened. The feature utilizes snapshots to suggest actions based on what it recognizes, making it easy to return to specific emails in Outlook or the right chat in Teams.

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.

Recall works by taking screenshots of your active window every few seconds, building snapshots of what you do over time. Microsoft says the feature will require at least a 256 GB hard drive with 50 GB of space available to store approximately three months of snapshots, but this can be increased by allocating more storage.

The Recall snapshots are analyzed by the NPU on Copilot+ PCs and an AI model to extract information from screenshots that is then added to a new Windows semantic index. Microsoft says all of this data is encrypted with Bitlocker encryption tied to the user's account and is not shared with other users on the same device.

This semantic index allows users to search for information using human language queries and pull up snapshots related to the query. In these snapshots, information, such as URLs, text, and images, can be interacted with, making it easier to find and use historical information.

Microsoft says the feature will roll out in June with support for only some languages, which will be English, Chinese (simplified), French, German, Japanese, and Spanish. More languages will be added in the future.

You can control what information and apps Recall can capture, and Microsoft says the AI works at the hardware level and keeps all data stored locally, never shared with the cloud or Microsoft.

"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."

While Microsoft states that no data will be sent to their servers, one concern immediately comes to mind with this feature: how this recorded data will be locally secured on Windows devices.

If a threat actor gains local access to a device, would they be able to access this data or send it to their own computers to analyze the information offline for sensitive data.

Furthermore, Microsoft admits that the feature performs no content moderation, meaning it will screenshot everything it sees in active windows, including credentials, banking information, and other confidential information.

Only Microsoft Edge's InPrivate windows and content protected by DRM will be excluded from Recall by default.

BleepingComputer contacted Microsoft about whether other browsers' private browsing features would be excluded and whether the Recall data would be secured if a device is breached. We will update our story if we receive a response.

Update 5/21/24: Added more technical information about the feature.