Google is Working on a Recall Feature for ChromeOS

In an interview this week, a Google vice president said that the firm was considering adding a feature like Microsoft Recall to ChromeOS. It’s called “Memory,” and it may have some roots in a Google I/O demo called Project Astra.

“I’m not going to talk about Recall, but I think the reason that some people feel it’s creepy is when it doesn’t feel useful, and it doesn’t feel like something they initiated or that they get a clear benefit from it,” Google’s John Solomon told PC World while at Computex this week. “If the user says like — let’s say we’re having a meeting, and discussing complex topics. There’s a benefit of running a recorded function if at the end of it, it can be useful for creating notes and the action items. But you as a user need to put that on and decide where you want to have that.”

At Google I/O last month, Google provided a demo of Project Astra, which it described as its vision for the future of AI assistants. The demo focused largely on using AI to identify objects in the real world as seen through a smartphone camera and a “prototype glasses device.”

“To be truly useful, an agent needs to understand and respond to the complex and dynamic world just like people do — and take in and remember what it sees and hears to understand context and take action,” Google explained of Project Astra. “Building on Gemini, we’ve developed prototype agents that can process information faster by continuously encoding video frames, combining the video and speech input into a timeline of events, and caching this information for efficient recall.”

Using AI for efficient recall. Interesting.

Why wasn’t Google’s demo of Project Astra as concerning as Microsoft Recall? Two reasons: It was just one of hundreds of individual features that Google announced at the event and, perhaps more important, it’s still an internal project and not a soon-to-be-shipping product (albeit in preview and to a very limited audience) as is Microsoft Recall.

PC World’s Mark Hachman asked Solomon whether Google was working to bring something like Recall and Project Astra to ChromeOS and, surprisingly, he said yes, adding that this feature was currently called Memory.

“I think there’s a piece of it which is very relevant, which is this notion of having some kind of context and memory of what’s been happening on the device,” Solomon said. “So think of something that’s like, maybe viewing your screen and then you walk away, you get distracted, you chat to someone at the watercooler and you come back. You could have some kind of rewind function, you could have some kind of recorder function that would kind of bring you back to that. So I think that there is a crossover there.”

“I think there’s something there in terms of screen capture in a way that obviously doesn’t feel creepy and feels like the user’s in control,” he added.

To be fair to Microsoft, that’s exactly how it describes Recall.

“You are in control with Recall,” the Microsoft Support website explains. “You can select which apps and websites you want to exclude, such as banking apps and websites. You can configure how much disk space Recall is allowed to use to store snapshots.”