Microsoft’s Recall AI is creepy, clever, and compelling

I honestly thought I’d hate Microsoft’s controversial Recall feature and immediately disable it, but after using it for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been both creeped out and impressed with what it’s capable of.

Recall, a Windows 11 feature that takes snapshots of mostly everything you see on your screen, quickly became a controversy earlier this year after Microsoft announced it. Privacy advocates immediately started warning about potential issues with Recall without even using it, and security researchers found big holes in a prerelease version of the feature. Microsoft delayed Recall multiple times to give the company more time to address the security issues, and it’s now in testing for Windows Insiders ahead of a broader rollout next year.

The first thing I noticed about Recall is that the initial setup experience is very clunky and feels unfinished. You launch the app, and it redirects you to Windows Update, where AI models will start downloading and installing. Once you’ve installed a trio of these, it looks like the install process is complete — but then Windows Update will find another component of Recall to install. After fiddling around for 10 minutes, Recall will finally offer up a setup experience that allows you to enable or disable snapshots.

Snapshots are the key part of how Recall works, and they form the foundation of a scrollable timeline that lets you jump back through everything you’ve seen. They’re essentially screenshots of what you were working on, much like how your browser history is stored in a web browser. But critically, a screenshot of your entire screen has a lot more information.

When I first started scrolling through the Recall timeline, it freaked me out. My emails were recorded, my Slack messages with colleagues were snapshotted, and photos from a recent vacation all went into Recall’s database. Even drafts of dumb tweets I didn’t send were captured by Recall. It honestly felt a little creepy to scroll through my digital life like this.

I immediately removed Slack from being added to Recall and deleted its relevant snapshots. Microsoft makes it easy to exclude an app from Recall in settings but also just to remove snapshots for specific apps at a later date. You can select a snapshot from the search interface of Recall and remove the associated app or even websites.

Once I’d gotten over the creepy aspect of Recall and changed some settings, I mostly forgot about the feature for a few days and let it do its thing of snapshotting my laptop until two things happened that really surprised me.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been doing some Christmas shopping, and I found the perfect gift for my partner and then immediately started searching around different stores for availability and pricing. I eventually got distracted and forgot to order the gift. A few days later, after I’d closed the tabs that I was using to search for the gift, I was trying to find it again. I headed into Chrome’s browsing history to find the website I’d seen with the best price, but I had searched through multiple retailers, so it was impossible to find the exact site without opening nearly 20 tabs and searching through manually again.

I pulled up Recall instead and searched just for “£85” on a whim, the best price I remember seeing for the item. Before I could blink, there it was, immediately in the Recall search interface. It didn’t take Recall minutes or even seconds; it was as instant as a Google search result. It was honestly surprising to see how fast this Recall search works, especially given Windows search features have only gotten worse over the years. 

Recall also helped me review the social media accounts of the suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. After the suspect was named, social media companies started removing profiles, but because I was browsing them with Recall, it stored them all on my PC before they vanished. I was able to scroll through the snapshots without having to rely on an online archiving service. As a journalist, I often have to screenshot tweets just in case someone deletes them, and Recall is just sitting there doing the work for me in case I forget.

Recall also lets you copy text or images from these snapshots it creates or, if it’s a website, you can just revisit the website again. Most of the time, this works well, but I have plenty of snapshots where Recall simply doesn’t recognize the text or let me copy it fully. There have also been times when I’ve searched for something I remember seeing and Recall didn’t store it, so it’s not recording literally everything you’ve seen.

While I’ve found some early examples of Recall helping me out, I still need more time to figure out whether I want to keep it enabled. As impressive as it is, I’m still wary of storing a digital trail like this on my laptop. I’m also waiting to see if security researchers are happy with Microsoft’s big Recall changes. One of the main changes means authenticating with Windows Hello every time you want to use Recall, which can be a little annoying right now. But if it keeps Recall secure, then I can’t really complain too much about this minor inconvenience.

It’s also important to note here that Recall will only be available on Copilot Plus PCs, so unless you’ve purchased one of these new laptops over the past six months, you won’t be able to access this new feature. There’s been a lot of FUD, largely from YouTubers, about how Microsoft is supposedly secretly planning to install Recall on every Windows 11 PC, but that’s simply not accurate. Recall is one of the headline features of Copilot Plus PCs and requires a dedicated NPU to run efficiently.

I’m now hoping that the new AI-powered changes to Windows Search will be as useful as Recall, without requiring snapshots of your PC. Microsoft is promising to launch a similar natural language search to the main search interface on Windows, allowing you to find files and documents without needing to know file names or search for pictures using words. If my experience with Recall is anything to go by, it should make finding files a breeze.

As I’ve started to rely more on Recall for searches, there have also been times I’ve been using my desktop PC and wished I had access to it. Microsoft is tying its new Windows AI features to NPUs, and we haven’t seen Intel or AMD lean into desktop CPUs that have Copilot Plus compatibility yet. I hope that changes soon because, as much as I’m not a fan of generative AI features that create images of people with six fingers, using AI to improve the daily tasks of searching for things on my PC is a far more compelling part of the future of Windows.

A Microsoft employee resigns with a protest over military contracts 

A software engineer quit Microsoft last week with a protest email that encouraged coworkers to sign a petition against Microsoft’s partnerships with the Israeli military and government.

Angela Yu’s email hit the inboxes of hundreds or thousands of Microsoft employees, but I understand from multiple sources that the email didn’t go companywide. It appears that Yu identified email distribution lists with hundreds or thousands of employees in each of them, allowing her to get her message out widely without having to seek the usual approvals to email colleagues in bulk.

“I joined Microsoft with the belief that my work will advance technology for ‘the good of humanity,’” Yu wrote in her December 4th email. “However, some of Microsoft’s business policies and recent actions against my colleagues make me wonder if the company is staying true to its own principles. I’m especially concerned about the reports from this year that disclose Microsoft products like Azure are powering military weapons platforms responsible for killing tens of thousands of people.”

Yu also referenced Microsoft firing two employees earlier this year after they held a vigil outside of Microsoft’s headquarters for Palestinians killed in Gaza. Much like Yu’s email, the protest called out Microsoft’s dealings with Israel and the Israel-Hamas war. Ben Hope, a Microsoft spokesperson, said that Microsoft “communicated our policies clearly to event organizers” and requested that the event occur off campus.

“We have emphasized that we are committed to a professional and respectful work environment, providing various channels for employee voices. However, disruptions to business operations are not allowed,” Hope said.

The pad:

Thanks for subscribing and reading to the very end. As we’re nearly at the end of 2024, this will be my last issue until the new year. I’m taking a two-week break over the Christmas period, before the CES shenanigans begin. I’m not expecting big news from Microsoft directly at CES, but I’m sure some of its software will appear in some unusual places in January. Stay tuned for more of that next year, and thanks for reading all my work throughout 2024.

If you’ve heard about any of Microsoft’s other secret projects, you can reach me via email at [email protected] or speak to me confidentially on the Signal messaging app, where I’m tomwarren.01. I’m also tomwarren on Telegram, if you’d prefer to chat there.