How would you feel about a PC that can remember
everything you do? And I'm not just talking about browser history
or old messages. I mean a PC that keeps an eye on everything
displayed on your screen, every app you have open, how long you spent looking at a picture,
all of your credit card transactions, everything.
Microsoft is hoping this will make you feel empowered
and not spied upon once the newest Windows 11 update
called 24H2 drops with the feature we just talked about, dubbed Recall.
The idea is relatively simple. Windows 11 will take snapshots of your screen
every few seconds and save them to disk. Using AI, these snapshots will become
easily searchable using natural language. So if you need to ask it a question like,
show me every message where I discussed Canadian maple syrup futures, Recall can locate those for you
even if you completely forgot when the message was sent or even what program you were using.
Happens to me all the time. It's pretty easy to see how this would be extremely useful
for quickly finding an important piece of information but it's also obvious that Windows has to collect
lots of information for the feature to work properly.
Recall uses a minimum of 25 gigabytes of space
if you have a rather small 256 gigs SSD
and the default amount that's allocated increases
with larger disk sizes. And of course, Microsoft is aware
that this sounds like a privacy nightmare. According to them, all of the data used by Recall
never leaves your device and is processed by the neural processing unit or NPU in your PC.
So the data doesn't need to be sent to the cloud. Of course, this still reinforces the importance
of making sure your machine is secure as Recall won't do things like hide account numbers
or passwords. Microsoft says that Recall data is gonna be secured
the same way as other data on your PC. But seeing as you're probably not used to thinking
of any random ephemeral thing that just happens
to be on your screen is becoming part of a semi-permanent record.
We're interested to see if Microsoft will beef up security around Recall as time goes on.
In the meantime, it is possible to exclude certain programs
and web browsers from Recall if you'd like.
Thank goodness for that. But here's the thing, there's a very good chance
you won't be able to even get Recall on your home PC anyway.
Recall is intended to be a feature on PCs that Microsoft is labeling with co-pilot plus.
Branding not to be confused with just co-pilot, the Windows AI assistant that has already been out
for a while, co-pilot plus PCs must have 16 gigs of RAM
and 256 gigs of storage, but also importantly,
have to have an NPU rated for at least 40 trillion
operations per second. Right now, there aren't any current consumer grade
x86 CPUs out there that include an NPU this powerful.
By comparison, current Intel and AMD products are capable of less than half of the number of operations.
This means the first product certified for co-pilot plus will instead be laptops
that contain Qualcomm Snapdragon X elite and X plus chips,
which are ARM based and will serve as something of a competitor to the M series chips found in Apple devices.
Although there has already been one Tinkerer who has gotten at Recall working on lower spec systems
that don't have an NPU, most folks will either need to buy one of these new laptops,
which will be out later this month, or wait until late 2024 when the 24H2 update drops
for x86 PCs and when we're expecting to see CPUs
from Intel and AMD that feature compatible NPUs.
Are you looking forward to having a search feature this powerful or does it seem too creepy for you
to be interested? Let us know down in the comments and thanks for watching.
Be sure to check out our other video on NPUs. If you wanna find out more about how they work.