Microsoft has confirmed in a blog update that Recall hasn’t been abandoned and will be ready for Windows Insider testing in October. The announcement comes after the company was forced to rethink its AI-powered automatic screenshot-taking feature just before the first Copilot+ PCs launched due to significant security concerns.
The idea behind Recall is to help people search for things they’ve seen on their PC. Say you’re researching a topic, and you have multiple tabs open on different sources. Sometime in the past few hours, you know you read the exact fact you needed, but now you can’t remember where it came from.
With Recall, you can type natural language prompts into the search bar and your PC will search through the screenshots it has been taking of your activity to find what you need. If your memory is failing you, you can even scroll through the screenshots yourself to jog your memory.
As convenient as this sounds, the privacy concerns are immediately obvious, and most people would want to be completely sure that no one but them could ever access the screenshots. Microsoft promised this level of security from the start, but once people started getting their hands on early versions of it, they started finding holes pretty quickly. One security researcher even claimed they could access every screenshot with just two lines of code.
Microsoft also initially announced Recall as default feature but quickly decided to change it to fully opt-in.
But now, accessing Recall requires Windows Hello to authenticate, whether by fingerprint or facial recognition. Microsoft has also talked about “just in time” decryption, which means the search index database is fully encrypted when not being accessed.
When it’s released for testing, researchers will surely scour every line of code to assess how secure the feature is now, and it will be interesting to see the results and how Microsoft reacts to them.
However it turns out, Recall is likely destined to not be the flagship AI feature it was designed to be. For people who have a better understanding of how it works and how it keeps screenshots safe, there could be a lot of benefit — we’ll have to see. Others, however, might remain apprehensive about entrusting such private information to a feature that keeps popping up in the news for being unsafe.
Speech-to-text apps have flooded the App Store, making it easier than ever to type on our Macs with just our voice. I have previously covered one such app called TypeWhisper. However, there has been a dearth of good text-to-speech models, and most of the good ones are locked behind a subscription.
Ollama, an open-source app that lets you run local AI models on your computer, wants to change that. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and your prompts are never stored or used for training.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).