- Windows 11 has an alternative take on Recall in testing
- It's an app called the 'Context Vault' offering a similar supercharged search experience
- In this case, though, you have to manually add content to the vault – there's no automatic regular screenshotting of the activity on your PC
Hate the idea of Recall in Windows 11? You wouldn't be alone, so Microsoft is trying a new spin on the idea of an AI-powered supercharged search which is a lot more limited than Recall – although the initial reaction has still been rather negative.
Windows Latest discovered that Microsoft is working on Project Pantheon, the current name of which is the 'Context Vault', and rather than being built into Windows 11 like Recall, this has to be installed from the Microsoft Store.
This isn't just an optional feature, then, it's an app you have to actively seek out, and it works quite differently to Recall in that it doesn't automatically take regular screenshots (snapshots) of the activity on your PC.
Instead, you must manually add the files or content you want to use with the Context Vault, so its AI powers can then make use of them.
To what end? Similar to Recall, you can ask the AI questions about the contents of the vault, or get it to organize material, planning the likes of a summer trip (the example Windows Latest gives) from documents, images, web pages, or even clipboard text saved to the vault.
Note that the app isn't yet officially available, and not listed in the Microsoft Store as such, but Windows Latest managed to find it nonetheless.
Context Vault doesn't necessarily need a Copilot+ PC – or a powerful local NPU, in other words, as it can leverage cloud-based AI – and you can give third-party AI like Claude access to the content in your vault, too, we're told. There's even a panel that tracks your AI token usage in the current build of the vault.
Bear in mind that this is still an early version of the feature, and it sounds pretty wonky right now. It's not clear if this app is something Microsoft will definitely carry forward to a release version for Windows 11, as ever with functionality in testing.
Analysis: is a retake on Recall going to fly?
On the one hand, the full user control over what content Context Vault can access compared to Recall could be a big selling point. On the other hand, using the cloud for running the AI processes is obviously more of a privacy concern (although you don't have to go that route to be fair).
Windows Latest has been led to believe that Microsoft is considering other ways to make the Context Vault more secure, including encryption and per-app access controls, as well as requiring a Windows Hello login for access (as Recall does) to protect the vault from possible local attackers jumping on your device.
As noted at the outset, the reaction to this idea in testing is generally skeptical, and many folks simply see it as 'yet more AI' that Microsoft is cramming into Windows 11 (although it isn't actually confirmed this is coming to the OS, of course).
As one Redditor puts it, this is a classic case of "solving [a] problem [that] doesn't exist."
Another agrees: "Yeah, Microsoft can't even be creative in thinking up something even marginally useful in an extremely far fetched scenario. Literally never in my life felt the need or wanted a tool like Recall or this equally s****y version of it. This problem was solved circa 2000 with bookmarks and Word/Excel documents. Not whatever convoluted trash this is."
In fairness, others are more positive, and there are Recall users out there. One commenter on the same thread says: "I use Recall all the time, it has been a gamechanger for me, I just wish it synced between my devices so I could look up something on my desktop I saw on my tablet."
The one thing that seems clear enough is that the anti-Recall folks aren't going to be swayed by a different take on the same concept, even one that sports a pretty radical change.
The kind of people this might persuade are those who most likely won't be drawn to comment on this idea in testing one way or another. I think it's certainly an alternative that's worth trying for Microsoft, provided it's implemented in a secure enough manner, of course.