Microsoft’s controversial Recall scraper is finally entering public preview
Over five months after publicly scrapping the first version of the Windows Recall feature for its first wave of Copilot+ PCs, Microsoft announced today that a newly rearchitected version of Recall is finally ready for public consumption.
For now, the preview will be limited to a tiny subset of PCs: Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and Plus Copilot+ PCs enrolled in the Dev channel of the Windows Insider program (the build of Windows that includes Recall is 26120.2415). Intel and AMD Copilot+ PCs can’t access the Recall preview yet, and regular Windows 11 PCs won’t support the feature at all.
If you haven’t been following along, Recall is one of Microsoft’s many AI-driven Windows features exclusive to Copilot+ PCs, which come with a built-in neural processing unit (NPU) capable of running AI and machine learning workloads locally on your device rather than in the cloud. When enabled, Recall runs in the background constantly, taking screenshots of all your activity and saving both the screenshots and OCR’d text to a searchable database so that users can retrace their steps later.