Microsoft announced a new Recall feature on Monday, along with new Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11 devices. This feature is designed to track and save every movement on your PC. Plus, you get everything you’ve ever seen on screen.
It reminds me of that Black Mirror An episode called “Your Whole History” featured in the first season. It’s a story about a fictional, ultra-modern sci-fi society where everyone wears implants that record everything they do, see, and hear.typically black mirror Without spoiling too much, the episode ends on a chaotic note, leaving viewers to ponder whether such invasive technology is worth it.
Current recalls aren’t as crazy as the “personal recorder” implants portrayed in the movies. black mirror This is a harmless feature designed to be a useful perk for Surface users. But I can’t help but notice some similarities.
What is a recall?
The call is similar to pressing CTRL + H or Command Y, but instead of just getting a history of your browser activity, you get everything you’ve ever seen on your Surface PC. How does it work? Windows 11 consistently takes screenshots of the screen and analyzes the past in natural language before using on-device generative AI models and NPUs (the internals that power AI processing). Get the stuff.
Credit: Microsoft
For example, at the Surface event on May 20th, Microsoft introduced a use case in which a woman was looking for a new dress online. She ended up liking some of the choices, but unfortunately she didn’t bookmark them. “With Recall, you can just search for ‘blue dress’ and it will show you every blue dress you’ve ever seen,” said Carolina Hernandez, principal product manager for Windows AI Experience at Microsoft.
Mashable Light Speed
In other words, Recall can go back through your tracked history to find screenshots that match your query (because it can recognize and identify objects) and feed them back with your search results.
Recall timeline
Credit: Microsoft
Interestingly, everything you do on your Surface PC is accessible via a scrollable timeline.
What about privacy?
The thought of having your PC recording everything you do can be unsettling, so Microsoft has preempted privacy and security concerns, saying it knows trust is important to many users. “We built Recall on our Responsible AI Principles and align it to our standards,” a Microsoft representative said. Additionally, Microsoft claims that it keeps users’ Recall data private, local, and secure on their Surface device.
The Redmond-based tech giant also pledged not to steal user data to train its AI models. The recall is only available for the aforementioned new Surface devices, which Microsoft calls “Copilot+ PCs.”
