When Microsoft set out to launch its new Copilot+ PCs, it needed an AI feature that could truly showcase the power of the advanced NPU and AI models. And that feature is Recall.

Let’s take a closer look at what Recall is all about. At its core, Recall is a way to search through your past activities on your PC. You can see a list of all the apps and websites you’ve used, and there’s a handy timeline that allows you to scroll back and revisit those moments. What makes it truly unique, of course, is the integration of the powerful AI component. It can understand your natural language prompts and requests, enabling it to dig deep into every nook and cranny of your PC’s digital world to find exactly what you’re looking for. Whether you’re trying to remember a detail from a conversation you had or searching for a specific file that you can’t quite recall the name of, Recall has got you covered. It presents the results in a way that categorizes them as either a “close match” or a “related match,” further breaking them down into “text matches” and “visual matches.” For example, if you search for “goat cheese pizza,” you might get results that include other Italian dishes as well. Another great example Microsoft gave is being able to remember a quote from a Teams message and seamlessly paste it into a text box in your PowerPoint presentation. And the best part? Recall can even find that elusive file for you without you having to know the exact file name or folder. Once you find what you’re seeking, you can interact with those elements directly within Recall. The program is smart enough to offer you different options based on the type of content, whether it’s a photo, text, or a website. And it’s accessible right from the taskbar, as well as through the convenient Windows Key+J keyboard shortcut.

Now, you might be wondering why some people are so upset about Recall. Well, the main concern from a privacy and security standpoint is that Microsoft is using small language models that are constantly running in the background, constantly watching and taking snapshots of your every move. This means that by default, your PC is aware of every single thing you do on it, and can use that information to recontextualize your behavior through AI. Every website you visit, every video you watch, every word you type, and every direct message you send will be tracked. And that’s a hard pill for many to swallow when it comes to privacy. Additionally, there have been serious security and privacy concerns raised, particularly by cybersecurity researcher Kevin Beaumont. Since these concerns were brought to light, Microsoft has taken steps to address them. The feature is now opt-in rather than being enabled by default, and it has been locked by Windows Hello. However, as more problems emerged, Microsoft finally announced that Recall would be temporarily removed from the first wave of Copilot+ PCs. To illustrate the potential dangers of the Recall feature, here’s a 40-second video of Mental Outlaw hacking into it. Microsoft has emphasized that once it becomes available again, it will likely be fully opt-in, giving users the ability to disable and customize various aspects of Recall. You can filter out certain apps or websites, delete parts of your data, or even turn it off entirely. You can also set a storage limit to ensure older snapshots are deleted first. This is something that will likely happen during the setup process, but can also be adjusted in the settings later. And Microsoft has promised that the data used by Recall is entirely kept on-device and never sent to the cloud or shared directly with the company. They claim the data isn’t used to train the models either. But given the sensitive nature of the data, not everyone is going to be completely comfortable with Microsoft’s assurances. Another aspect that’s causing some consternation is compatibility. Not everyone will be able to enjoy the benefits of Recall right away. Unfortunately, unless you’re one of the first to buy one of the new Copilot+ PCs, your device won’t have access to this feature. Even next-gen AMD and Intel devices that are part of the “Copilot+” brand won’t get Recall at launch. And even for those Copilot+ PCs, Recall has already been removed from the first wave of Snapdragon X PCs in response to the security criticisms. It will eventually be available through an update, but the exact timing is unknown. However, it’s important to note that these Copilot+ PCs look like they’re going to be truly remarkable laptops. They’re said to be head and shoulders above the currently available models and even seem to rival modern MacBooks in many ways. Microsoft claims that the NPU inside, which is capable of delivering 40 TOPS at very low wattages, is what makes Recall possible. Instead of relying on your CPU or GPU, Recall is seamlessly offloaded to the NPU in the background, allowing for efficient processing. Now, you might be wondering why your GPU can’t handle the job. Microsoft doesn’t have a straightforward answer for that, other than suggesting it might impact your battery life. But given that Recall is a key feature of Copilot+, they’re not just going to open it up to all PCs. Nevertheless, the NPU seems to be here to stay, and we can expect its performance capabilities to continue to improve in the coming years. Maybe Recall truly does require that efficient NPU to function at its best. Either way, for the foreseeable future, it will likely be a feature that’s available to a select few users.