Google is working on a Recall-like feature for Chromebooks, too

Microsoft’s new Recall feature in Windows 11 has attracted a ton of attention — some good, some bad. But Google’s ChromeOS chief says that the company is cautiously exploring a Recall-like feature for Chromebooks, too, referred to right now as “memory.”

I sat down with John Solomon, the vice president at Google responsible for ChromeOS, for a lengthy interview around what it means for Google’s low-cost Google platform as the PC industry moved to AI PCs. Microsoft, of course, is launching Copilot+ PCs alongside Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite — an Arm chip. And Chromebooks, of course, have a long history with Arm.

But it’s Recall that we eventually landed upon — or, more precisely, how Google sidles into the same space. Recall is great in theory, but in practice may be more problematic.) Recall the Project Astra demo that Google showed off at its Google I/O conference. One of the key though understated aspects of it was how Astra “remembered” where the user’s glasses were.

Astra didn’t appear to be an experience that could be replicated on the Chromebook. Most users aren’t going to carry a Chromebook around (a device which typically lacks a rear camera) visually identifying things. Solomon respectfully disagreed.

“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.

Can Google eliminate the creepy factor?

“We’re actually talking to that team about where the use case could be,” Solomon added of the “memory” concept. “But 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.”

That sounds a lot like Recall! But Solomon was quick to point out that one of the things that has turned off users to Recall was the lack of user control: deciding when, where, and if to turn it on.

“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,” Solomon said. “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.”

And there’s more! Our in-depth interview goes into the Recall issue in more detail, and also addresses questions like whether Chromebooks will include the Snapdragon X Elite, what features will benefit from an NPU, and what will happen to the “generic” Chromebook when Google is prioritizing AI inside the Chromebook Plus.

Further reading: Best of Computex 2024: The most intriguing and innovative PC hardware