Windows 11 24H2's exclusive AI feature Recall has already been ported to existing hardware

Recall, the feature Microsoft announced for Windows 11 at its May 20 event, is certainly an interesting addition to the operating system. Unfortunately, getting your hands on it requires buying one of the recently unveiled Copilot+ PCs with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Series processors. However, as expected, enthusiasts have already backported Recall to existing hardware, even to quite low-powered Windows on ARM devices.

Albacore, who goes by the @thebookisclosed handle on X, announced today that they managed to get Recall working on a low-end PC with the Snapdragon 7cx processor and 4GB of RAM. Although the 7cx is an ARM chip, it does not have a built-in NPU, plus just 3.4GB of available memory makes things seemingly much more challenging (especially considering that the official requirement is a minimum of 16GB RAM).

Despite the limitations, Albacore said the feature works "surprisingly good." Also, the author promised to release a detailed guide soon so that owners of Surface Pro X and other Windows on ARM devices can get their hands on Recall. As for x86, things are a bit more challenging since the ML models for manufacturers include mostly ARM64 packages. Still, you should eventually be able to run Recall on an x86 machine.

The idea of Recall is both interesting and slightly worrying. Although Microsoft has already made it clear that all the processing happens on-device and no data leaves your computer, many users expressed concern over the idea of Windows 11 taking a screenshot of literally everything on the screen every few minutes. However, it is worth noting that Windows 11 will let you toggle Recall off or specify what apps should never be snapshotted.

Recall will be available as part of the upcoming Windows 11 version 24H2, which is now available for public testing in the Release Preview Channel, which is the final step before the public release.