When Microsoft announced the Windows 11 Recall feature for Copilot PCs in June, there was immediate backlash and controversy. The company quickly withdrew the feature and promised to work on it.

Today, Microsoft announced that Recall will be taken off the bench - but with a few caveats: to access a preview of Recall, you must be a Windows Insider on the Dev Channel, a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite or Snapdragon X Plus chipset and own a Copilot+ PC.

Recall, Recall is a tool for quickly searching apps, documents, images, and websites on your PC in a conversational manner. As originally envisioned, Recall periodically takes a searchable snapshot of the PC desktop. In September, the company published a blog post explaining how it is addressing security and privacy to improve Recall to make it more secure.

According to today's announcement, Recall still takes snapshots, but only if screenshot saving is enabled. Furthermore, Microsoft claims that Recall requires biometric authentication with Windows Hello (i.e., you must prove that it is you using something like a fingerprint reader or webcam) in order to function, and when and where Recall will save snapshots claims to be able to dictate when and where to save snapshots.

The company claims that Recall does not send snapshots from your PC to Microsoft or third parties or use them for training. According to the announcement, the company also “does not have access to the key to see the encrypted data, so if you need to remove Windows Hello, reset your PC, or move to a new PC, you cannot restore the snapshots.”

Additionally, Recall has reportedly been updated to be able to detect sensitive information such as credit card information and passwords. If such information is detected, the snapshot will not be saved.

Along with Recall, Microsoft announced a new feature for Recall called Click to Do. This feature “recognizes text and images in a snapshot” and allows users to copy text, search the web based on the text, open websites, share images, blur backgrounds in photo apps, erase objects, etc., in the context of whatever they click. related options.

For now, Click to Do only works within Recall, but Microsoft says it will eventually become a standard AI feature available across Windows As with the Recall preview, Click to Do will be available on Snapdragon-based based Copilot+ PCs.

Here is how to access Recall (preview) and Click to Do if you meet the requirements:

It should be noted that this is more or less a beta version and Recall has known bugs.

This includes Recall not working with “some accessibility applications” (Microsoft has not identified those applications), delays in submitting feedback, delays in displaying snapshots (but restarting is supposed to fix this), delays in ), and making sure Secure Boot is enabled to save snapshots.