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…