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

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.