Microsoft rolls Windows Recall out to the public nearly a year after announcing it

The improved Recall still tries to record everything you do on your PC.

Nearly a year after announcing the feature, Microsoft is finally ready to roll the controversial Windows Recall feature out to the general public, the company announced today on its Windows Experience Blog.

Only available on Copilot+ PCs, a subset of Windows 11 systems sold within the last year or so, Recall takes continuous screenshots of everything you do on your PC, saving them, scraping text from them, and saving it all in a searchable database. This obviously has major security and privacy implications—anyone who can get access to your Recall database can see nearly everything you've done on your PC—which is why Microsoft's initial rollout attempt was such a mess.

Recall's long road to release involved a rushed initial almost-launch, harsh criticism of its (then mostly nonexistent) security protections, multiple delays, a major under-the-hood overhaul, and five months of testing in Microsoft's Windows Insider beta program. Microsoft signaled that Recall was nearly ready for release two weeks ago when it came to the near-final Release Preview channel.

Testing of the new version of Recall, both by Ars and other security researchers, found that the company had addressed many of the substantive complaints about Recall's security and added better automated content filtering to help keep the feature from storing some kinds of sensitive information (though this filtering is still inconsistent). But most significantly, Microsoft has made Recall a feature you must opt in to using rather than opt out of using, and it's possible to remove it completely.

Recall is the most high-profile feature in the release Microsoft is starting to roll out today, but there are a few other changes in it for Copilot+ PCs. One is a new version of Windows' Search function, which "can understand the contextual meaning of words or phrases, making search more natural and intuitive." This natural-language search can be used in the Search box in the Taskbar, in File Explorer, and in the Settings app. Another new feature, called "Click to Do," lets you copy text from images, search the content on your screen, and quickly summarize or rewrite on-screen text (you can invoke it by pressing the Windows key and then clicking, hence Click to Do).

Copilot+ PCs have specific hardware requirements beyond the ones necessary to run Windows 11. The most significant is the requirement for a neural processing unit (NPU) that can process more than 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS). The NPU enables more processing of AI and machine learning models on-device so that these features can work more quickly and without sending sensitive personal information to Microsoft's servers.

The only consumer processors that currently support Copilot+ are Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and Plus chips, Intel's Core Ultra 200V-series laptop chips (codenamed Lunar Lake), and AMD's Ryzen AI 300 series. Copilot+ features have generally been coming to the Arm-based Qualcomm PCs first and to x86-based Intel and AMD PCs later; Recall and the improved Search are available for both Arm and x86 PCs, while some Click to Do features are currently only available for Arm systems.

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