When I first saw an analysis of Microsoft Recall, I was puzzled. Recall is the new feature that lets you recall anything you did on your Microsoft Windows workstation. You can get back to websites you visited or presentations you worked on by merely describing them. This feature is quite useful. I always thought Microsoft did not put smart enough search features; so now they did. What puzzled me still was not why the feature is needed, but why it is built the way it is. It just seems too inefficient.

Recall is based on taking snapshots, yes, screen-grabs, of your computer screen once every few minutes or so, while you’re working, storing them, processing them using AI, and using the resulting information to understand what you are working on, so you can recall it later. Really?! Is this the most efficient way to get what we want? What happened to good old indexing of data, like all search engines do? Does Google take graphic screen-shots of what web pages look like on the screen just to throw tons of expensive AI cycles on them to extract a textual description of what they are about?

It’s only when I started thinking of what could be the real motivation behind the Recall feature, that I could finally understand this design decision. No, it has nothing to do with security.

Continue reading "Microsoft Recall makes more sense when you realize its potential purpose"