When Microsoft announced Recall earlier this year, the move took the tech world by storm and not in a good way.Recall is supposed to help you find almost anything you see on your PC by taking screenshots in the background and turning your everyday Windows usage into a searchable database. Out of the gate, Microsoft made some questionable privacy decisions, and the company was unable to properly explain why we should actually trust Recall to collect and process so much sensitive info.Now, many months later and after a variety of changes, the controversial Windows Recall feature is finally available for testing as long as you have a Qualcomm Snapdragon X-powered Copilot+ PC and are willing to join the bleeding-edge Windows Insider Dev channel for testing early software. In other words, most average business users cant actually test it yet.But that doesnt mean you have to remain blind to the progress. Ive been using Recall on a Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 for the past few days. And, while I was intrigued by its promise (especially after those privacy changes), its just nowhere near what Microsoft has promised.Want expert insights on the future of Windows? Check out my free Windows Intelligence newsletter three new things to try every Friday. Plus, get a free Windows Field Guide as a special welcome bonus!Why you might want to use Windows RecallOn the surface, Recall sounds like an intriguing enough feature for knowledge workers. Just think: If you have a modern Copilot+ PC, Windows can take screenshots (or snapshots) in the background every five seconds and store them for later. Then, you can use AI to search through them.Imagine being able to ask, What was that document I was looking at a week ago the one with the green-and-red pie chart? or I was researching hotels a month ago show me the one with a balcony overlooking the river. Recall would understand the content of the snapshots, including the images, and use AI to understand and process your precise requests in theory, at least.Depending on who you are and how you use your PC, it seems like either a fascinatingly useful feature or something youd definitely want to avoid. But it definitely doesnt seem boring.And Microsoft designed Recall in a much more private way than you might expect, especially after the latest round of changes. You can read my in-depth Recall privacy FAQ for all the details around how exactly that works. Now, I want to get into the specifics of what the systems actually like to use.Getting to know Microsofts Windows Recall interfaceFirst things first: When youre using a Copilot+ PC where Recall is available, the feature isnt turned on automatically by default. You have to choose to activate it, or it wont do anything. And once Recall is active, its never hiding. Recall shows a status icon in your system tray, and you can use that status icon to see what its doing, access settings, and pause it from saving snapshots.The Recall system tray icon lights up blue whenever the system is active.Chris Hoffman, IDGIn the Recall setting window, you can tell Recall to never capture snapshots of specific applications or websites. (Recall already wont capture snapshots of private browsing windows in modern web browsers like Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and other Chromium-based browsers.)The Settings window lets you filter out specific apps and websites so Recall will never capture them.Chris Hoffman, IDGYou can open the full Recall window from that system tray icon or via a taskbar icon or Start menu shortcut. When you do, youll have to authenticate with Windows Hello (using facial recognition, a fingerprint, or a PIN) before you can access any snapshots or associated info.Recall protects your snapshots with encryption, and you have to authenticate to see them.Chris Hoffman, IDGThen, you can see the current snapshots or scroll back through everything youve had on your screen by hand. But the real point of the Recall window is the search box, where you can search a sprawling database of snapshots simply and without any real effort again, in theory.The reality of Microsoft Recall searchIn this first public test release, the basics are all perfectly functional. Lets say, for example, you want to recall what you were reading about a project named Windows Longhorn. You can plug in the word Longhorn, and youll find instances where the word Longhorn appeared on your screen. This could help you find relevant documents, emails, and web pages youd explored. That could conceivably be useful to knowledge workers who are looking for a more powerful search experience.Unfortunately, it doesnt quite work like Microsoft promised. Lets say you want to find pie charts: A Recall search for the term pie chart will generally only find pie charts if the words pie and chart actually appeared on the screen at the same time. In other words, the visual search is not working like youd expect.Recalls text matches work much more reliably than the visual matches.Chris Hoffman, IDGAdditionally, the AI-powered part of the search doesnt seem to be functioning properly at all. I cant reliably perform queries like Find me that document from yesterday with a blue pie chart.Mostly, what Recall seems to be doing is:Capturing the contents of the screen every five seconds or soUsing optical character recognition (OCR) to convert the words on screen to searchable textLetting you search for words in those screenshots and showing you the resultsThats potentially interesting, but its far from what I expected and what Microsoft promised. Recall does provide visual matches in addition to those text matches, but they often dont seem to be particularly relevant or helpful.The power of Recalls Click to Do capabilityBasic search smarts aside, Recall includes a noteworthy option called Click to Do. After you open a snapshot, Click to Do will make the snapshot interactive, letting you copy text and images and perform actions on the image. For example, you can copy selected text, perform a web search for something seen within the snapshot, or send an email to a selected web address from the snapshot.Recall uses optical character recognition (OCR) to extract text from snapshots and make it copyable.Chris Hoffman, IDGRecalls Windows integration problemMore than anything, the core issue with Recall is that the system isnt really part of Windows at any deep level. Its an application that captures screenshots and lets you search through them. It doesnt work closely enough with the applications you actually use.Heres what I mean: Lets say you used Recall to dig up a Word document you were looking at the other day. Now youve found the document, and you want to open it.Well, Recall knows the document was in Microsoft Word, so you can click a button to open Word. But Recall doesnt know what specific file document was involved. Theres no one-click action to open a specific document. You have to look at the title of the document in the Microsoft Word snapshot and hunt it down yourself.This works a bit better with snapshots of web browsers, since the URL of the web page is displayed at the top of the screen in the address bar so Click to Do can extract the web address and let you open it in a single click.But, if the address of the web page is particularly long or your browser window is particularly small, the full address of the web page wont appear visually in the snapshot. And that means you wont be able to open it, since Recall only captures and uses visual details.In other words, Recall functions as a bit of a dirty hack in some ways. Rather than applications providing information to Recall about what documents, pages, or emails you have open, Recall just grabs whatever it can see visually on screen. And that doesnt create an especially compelling real-world experience.Microsofts multi-device challengeTheres another asterisk to consider with Recalls practical effectiveness, and its connected to some of the more positive-seeming changes Microsoft has made to the system.For privacy reasons, Recall snapshots are stored only on your PC. They cant be synced to any other device. Thats beneficial for privacy, sure, but it has some serious consequences for knowledge workers.Specifically, Recall only allows you to search snapshots of things youve seen on your current PC. If you use multiple computers a laptop and a desktop PC, for example youll have to ask yourself, Did I see that thing on my laptop or my desktop? And that confusion only gets more complicated when you factor in devices like phones and tablets.Im not sure this will ever be resolved, as theres such a strong push to keep Recall data on each device and for good privacy reasons. But it will create an awkward challenge for productivity workers looking to use the feature.The future of Windows RecallWhat were seeing now is less of a finish line and more of a first step in a long, ongoing race. As it stands now, Recall isnt for everyone, and Im glad its off by default. Many people, particularly privacy-conscious professionals and those who work at companies with strict policies surrounding data use, wont want to touch it. But many knowledge workers would benefit from a more powerful search tool that helps them dig through all the information theyve seen on their PC, and it would be great if Microsoft could deliver a more powerful experience.As of its initial testing release, Recall delivers the bare minimum and doesnt provide the strong visual analysis and AI-powered search features Microsoft promised. I hope Recall evolves and improves. And it very well might! We cant judge it only based on this early release. (Of course, Recall was supposed to launch on consumer PCs nearly six months ago.)But Im hoping for progress. It would be a shame to go through such a long and controversial news cycle and not get a powerful tool out of it. Right now, it doesnt make sense that Microsoft took so much heat for this feature.This is only the start: Sign up for my free Windows Intelligence newsletter to be the first to see my in-depth impressions. Youll also get three new things to try every Friday and free copies of Paul Thurrotts Windows Field Guides as a special welcome bonus.