I Tested an Open-Source Alternative to Windows Recall That Works on Any PC

Jun. 14, 2024

After announcingRecall AIat the Copilot+ PC event, Microsoft faced backlash from the Windows community over privacy and security concerns. Microsoft finally made theRecall feature opt-inby default and added “just-in-time” decryption for improved security. And now, Microsoft hasdelayed the Recall featureand will be previewing it first in the Windows Insider Program before the official rollout.

It means that Recall AI will not be available on Copilot+ PCs which is shipping on June 18. Nevertheless, if you want to test an open-source alternative to Windows Recall, check out OpenRecall. It runs on all kinds of PCs (x86, Windows, Linux, macOS) and does not require a separate NPU.

OpenRecall Runs on Intel and AMD PCs Without an NPU

OpenRecall is an open-source project (GitHub) that takes screenshots of your screen and analyzes them using small AI models on the device. The approach is similar to Microsoft’s Recall implementation. However, you can use it on x86 Intel/AMD PCs as well, and it doesn’t require an NPU.

OpenRecall analyzes texts and images and stores the embeddings in an SQLite database on your PC. It also has a user-friendly web UI where you can semantically search and find past activities.

What I don’t like is that the screenshots and DB file are stored underC:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\openrecalland anyone can access it. Currently, there is no encryption provided. I was able to open the DB file using SQLite Browser. So from a security standpoint, OpenRecall is not quite private and secure.

Overall, I like that users can run a Recall-like feature on non-Copilot+ PCs, without buying new hardware. However, the lack of encryption is a major concern. If you want to test OpenRecall on your PC, follow our guide below.

Keep in mind that OpenRecall doesn’t allow you to extract texts using OCR yet. Also, for visual searches, it doesn’t work well. Perhaps, it requires a small vision model to perform on-device object detection. However, that may be taxing on PC’s resources. Nevertheless, in my testing, OpenRecall’s operation consumed around 500MB of RAM and Python’s CPU usage was close to 20%.

So this is how you can use an open-source alternative to Windows Recall on your existing Windows PC. If you are facing any issues, let us know in the comment section below.

Passionate about Windows, ChromeOS, Android, security and privacy issues. Have a penchant to solve everyday computing problems.