A private alternative to Microsoft Recall
Recall asks you to trust a months-deep archive of your screen. We think a machine's memory should work more like yours: recent, useful, and gone unless you choose to keep it.
The honest comparison
Microsoft Recall (a Windows 11 Copilot+ feature) takes periodic snapshots of your screen and builds a searchable history reaching back months, so you can find anything you have ever seen. After its rocky 2024 debut it was rebuilt: it is now opt-in, gated behind Windows Hello, and encrypted. Credit where due - those were the right fixes.
MyQuietShadow's memory makes a different bet: a rolling 24 hours, overwritten automatically. Forgetting is the default; keeping a moment is your explicit act. There is no months-deep archive to leak, subpoena, or worry about - because it does not exist.
| Microsoft Recall | MyQuietShadow | |
|---|---|---|
| History kept | Months (searchable archive) | 24 hours, then overwritten |
| Philosophy | Remember everything | Forget by default, keep on purpose |
| Where data lives | On device | On device, encrypted |
| Hardware | Copilot+ PC (NPU) required | A normal Windows PC |
| Voice dictation into any app | No | Yes - the core feature |
| Clip export (mp4/wav/gif) | No | Yes (memory feature) |
| Status | Shipped | Early access waves - dictation first |
It is also a different kind of product
Recall is a search engine for your past. MyQuietShadow is a voice helper - offline dictation into any app today, voice control of the machine next - with the short-term memory as its supporting feature. If what made you search for a Recall alternative is the feeling of being archived, the answer is not a different archive. It is a helper that forgets.
Read our full privacy stance or see how it works.