Oh dear. My stock, clean Windows install with its default config absolutely poops the bed when trying to perform basic search/retrieval tasks (I'm talking things like launching an app I started to type the name of after hitting the windows key). Whenever I've dug into what it's doing, I've found it busy doing more important things like indexing my temp directories, or node_modules, or ensuring that all of my malware service executables are eliminated.
It's a nice headline feature but I really can't see it having a positive impact on the default Windows user experience.
Mine usually is pretty responsive about it, but the results searching in the start menu are strange. I start typing the name of something, what I want pops up, I type one too many characters (still a substring of the correct name) and suddenly it decides something completely different is the best match.
I always assumed there was some logic like "well I presented 'telegram' and they kept typing so 'telegram' must be incorrect" even if the time between those was less than human reaction time.
"teleg" -> Web search for "telegraph"
"telegr" -> Search for "telegr" in Outlook Web Emails
"telegra" -> Web search: did you mean "Telstra"?
"telegram" -> No results found
Now you have to divine the English name of a Windows app or feature, because although its name is localized when you‘ve already found it, search may or may not only look for the English name.
imo it's embarrassing that the ux was better with windows 2000 up through 7, using windows key + first 3 letters + enter gave me reliable way to jump into an app
I install startisback on any windows machine i have power over, of course on my work machine i just have to suffer but at least im getting paid while i wait for the search to settle on a result
> Recall won’t work with every Windows 11 computer. You’ll have to buy one of several fresh new “Copilot Plus PCs” powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite chips
Oh, thank goodness. That makes it much easier to avoid this sort of thing.
> Recall won’t work with every Windows 11 computer. You’ll have to buy one of several fresh new “Copilot Plus PCs” powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite chips, which have the neural processing unit (NPU) required for Recall to work.
Well... unlocking the future of a small subset of PCs, at least.
As a customer (who isn’t interested in their new product), I can’t help wondering if they pivoted due to fore-knowledge of this Windows feature? If the capability becomes a commodity/expected OS feature, maybe Apple has/is expected to have similar plans and will eat their lunch.
I am disappointed about this one. The company decided to put its weight behind a new product that replaces it called “Limitless”. Though useful, it focuses exclusively on meetings. I had fully bought into the promise of having a second brain/external memory. Reclaim wasn’t perfect but it was a decent “beta” quality product with a great future.
So while I dislike Windows and Microsoft’s poor track record with privacy, I am still going to root for Recall!
Edit: Reading that last sentence again made me question if I can trust MS with basically a recording of everything I am doing on the PC. Probably not.
If you still want something to look back at your usage, I am making https://screenmemory.app which is sort of like Rewind, except without AI (only text search) and a nicer timeline.
I'm curious about the ToS. As far as i know, their version of ChatGPT on Copilot don't like +18/sexual stuff, so how would the Copilot+ react to a lot of it? Would you get banned? would it work? Would it simple ignore all the stuff when asked for it?
Interesting. I have been thinking of building something just like this. Basically by using a web proxy that logs all my traffic (after all, 95% of things happen on the web these days). There's actually some tools for this purpose already.
However, this would be such a treasure trove for bad people that I'd have to secure it so damn well that I didn't really think about it. Of course I'd have to break open TLS using a MITM certificate which is a whole can of worms.
However if I would do this it is something I'd want FULL control over. I definitely don't want to give it all up to Microsoft and trust their blue eyes. Nope. Really nope. Their track record of things like Edge is so bad, first introducing a nice tool and as soon as it gets a tiny bit of market presence they start milking it already (think things like the shopping bar, or the buy-now-pay-later scams in edge).
I hate being the product for ad-targeting for visceral reasons, but it's benign compared to my days falling into the hands of someone who wishes me harm.
There are other companies that I work harder to keep my metrics away from than from MS. MS at least makes money from things other than ads.
But I don't trust Microsoft to secure that data. If Google did this product, I would have lower expectation of my screen recordings ending up on the dark web.
"To ensure your privacy against malicious use, we seed about 15% of the logs with fabricated entries that don't actually correspond with what you were doing on your computer."
"Wait a minute... doesn't GPT-4 still have a 15% hallucination rate when it comes to document summarization?"
can't help but laugh and think of "ruin my search history" which when clicked on will make your system search google for lots of interesting stuff like "isis application form" and "mail order paternity test".
We need a "fix my search history" adding searches like "too many windows ads install linux"
They did the math. The users that will leave are the ones that have zero value from an adtech standpoint, which is now the main source of revenue for the consumer division. Culling those users might even be seen as a gain from the remarketing dept because they'll be able to sell Windows as a source of docile morons you can sell anything to.
Also search and retrieval isn't that bad anymore? Spotlight gets a lot right. Google gets a lot right.
Dystopian panopticon implementation aside, I just don't think computers are that bad at most things people use them for that we need a whole paradigm shift like Recall.
Until this technology starts doing things like reading my email for me and letting me know only the important things and I trust it to the point I can stop checking email, this is a nightmarish stopgap using screenshots and LLMs.
Spotlight also sucks for me in the latest macOSes (e.g. from Mavericks until now).
It always seems to find a bunch of nonsense files and the real ones I'm looking for appear much later.
The whole metadata database that spotlight successfully built in Tiger and Leopard doesn't seem to exist anymore. In those days it worked totally fine.
It's a nice headline feature but I really can't see it having a positive impact on the default Windows user experience.