Microsoft may be planning to unleash AI on your local audio and video files with Windows 11's 'intelligent search'

Microsoft's Recall was not well received, I believe it's fair. Windows 11's Recall feature was not well received by many.

How about Windows AI looking at your local media files. Twitter user @XenoPanther was digging around in the Windows Insider Preview Build, and found a reference to "intelligent search" (via TweakTown). According to XenoPanther the feature will allow you to search for "spoken words" in your indexed audio or video files.

By clicking "I agree", you consent to the scanning of media files on your device. The required model will be installed in the background if needed.

Once the AI model has been set up, your media files will need to be transcribed and indexed before you can enable content-based searching. Once the process is completed, we'll let you know.

This is the only source that we have for this feature. There are still many questions. If we take the information at face value, and assume that the source is accurate, this would be a CoPilot+ Integration, which would mean it would need an NPU to process the AI.

It's not clear whether you would point the AI at a specific folder or file, or if you would simply give it all the media files in your computer. The latter is not practical, as it would be difficult to process a large number media files with full transcriptions at once. However, the wording of the article suggests that this might be the plan.

Privacy is another concern. Even if it was an "opt-in feature", letting AI index and transcribe your local media content in bulk seems like a privacy nightmare. It may be useful to point it at a specific file or folder. Third-party cloud-based service providers like Otter.ai are recording meetings and briefings for transcription for some time.

After the Recall fiasco, it's unlikely that users will feel comfortable letting AI loose on sensitive content stored on their own machines. Those who would prefer their local media to remain untouched by AI tendrils can ignore the warning. If it's a machine wide scraping of my media files, do you personally agree? I'll opt out, thank you.

It looks as if it's a feature that is merely being planned, and not something that will be released soon.