Do not index
Do not index
What if you never forgot anything ever?
That’s what Rewind hopes to be for you; an actual second brain in capturing everything you’ll ever see, say, or hear. And it does this with the power of precision and detail you’ve come to expect from the very best conversational Ai available now.
It’s pretty much Google for your life.
But what sets Rewind up in a class of its own is how a really powerful tool capable of so much, encompassing so much of your life, yet with so little interruption to your workflow and quite importantly no intrusion into your privacy, can sit so snugly on your Mac computer and not tax it to smithereens.
Co-founder of Rewind, Dan Siroker, who’s no newbie to the startup scene, having previously created two companies, Stribe and Optimizely, says that the tool uses every aspect of your Apple M1 and M2 silicon so that running Rewind doesn’t tax system resources (like CPU and memory) while it is recording. It feels virtually imperceptible.
That’s a bold claim. Especially since the tool is ever-recording everything happening across your screen. Every character typed, every image viewed, every document and file, every folder opened, every video watched. Everything. It’s always watching and always recording.
I know, I know. I saw my life flash before my eyes too; visualising myself in a Sarah Connor style tank top, readying to battle the Ai invasion. But Dan, who started the company with his co-founder Brett Bejcek, assures that the Ai only ever stores your records locally, and can never actually take over your PC.
Still though, knowing that such a powerful tool sits on my PC is unsettling, and reminds me of all the Black Mirror scenes I’d love to completely forget. Notwithstanding, a ton of users can’t help but testify to the tool’s extreme functionality, which has been particularly useful to recall specifics from meetings and grab screenshots from presentations that would have been forgotten in the sidebars of meeting app chatrooms.
Most users have become themselves ambassadors and marketers of the product, stating often that it’s easy to forget that it’s an extra feature because of how easily it fits into your life.
But how does Rewind even work?
Once you download the application on your new MacBook or other M1/M2 device, the application gets to work taking your life. Every detail of it. Second by second it steals your PCs soul. – that’s obviously a joke, but technically this is the premise of how it works – not forgetting everything you've seen, read or heard on your computer anymore.
Dan says he started to go deaf in his 20s. And it wasn’t until he turned 30, and started gaining the ability to hear again with a hearing aid, that he understood the power of technology for augmenting human capabilities. That single experience changed his life, and set him down a hunters path for researching life-enabling tech.
That hunt led him to research on memory loss, and how little solutions, like his trusted hearing aid, existed for keeping forgotten thoughts within reach. If we have hearing aids for hearing, and glasses for vision, what’s the equivalent for memory? – That question was answered in Rewind.
But that was in March 2020, and Rewind would only become a thing in 2022. Scribe was born first, and when Apple released the new Macs, everything was ready for this AI revolution; passion meets tech hardware meets Ai boom.
So how does it really work?
Think of the of WayBack Machine on Archive.org that takes a working snapshot of every website at a specific time in history, and imagine that for everything else happening on your computer, every second of every day. That’s how scary the software’s capability reaches. You can literally rewind back through meetings, videos, webpages, everything.
I believe the most tasking ask would be what to even search for in the first place.
The app requires no specific permission or integrations with your browser, or email apps or such. No, its 100-privacy pro, and stores everything locally on your Apple laptop.
What’s however happening is that, everything visibly occurring on your screen is being recorded. Like a screen video recording, pretty much. Including input from your keyboard, speakers, microphones and cameras. Everything gets captured.
Then the AI uses advanced image recognition, text to speech, speech to text, video to text, everything reversible within media possibility, to identify and recognise what it has captured. It’s the most magical thing that’s happened to the Mac since the beginning of the internet. You begin to wonder why Apple never took their own product, Time Machine, to this level.
Rewind (the company) says that they utilise a revolutionary compression code that helps then compress raw data recording up to 3,750x without major loss of quality. Meaning that for example, 10.5GB of raw recording data becomes 2.8MB. It’s hard to believe, but hey this is the future.
All that compressed data is stored locally on your own hard-drive, with Rewind insisting that nothing is shared online (unless you do), and they have no access to it either.
They further explain that in order to enable you search for anything you’ve seen, the app will use Apple’s native macOS APIs and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to recognise and index all the words that appear on your screen, and state-of-the-art Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) for all the audio, video and sounds.
All of the content is searchable, as long as it was visibly (or audibly) shared or transmitted.
For people who are ever-balancing various tasks and meetings through their computer, Rewind is a useful tool for returning to important details. I can’t overstate how effective it would be for people who need to remember anything, and everything that they do on their computer, to appreciate this tech.
I’ve often found myself trying to recollect where or when I read something online, and dreading having to combine through 100s of lines of browser history to find it (if I even remember the right word at all); that’s the sweet spot that Rewind finds itself. – a copilot for your mind. You can ask Rewind about anything you've seen, said, or heard. It’ll find it.
Top Features?
- Dan’s and his team have been ever iterating to make the tool smoother to use, and even smarter still, including more recently the ability to easily share meeting summaries that the Ai creates: Meaning that you no longer need a secretary at your meetings frantically taking notes, thank God, so everyone can now be more present in the conversations.
- They’ve also announced that visibility of the Rewind history window has improved so you can move transcripts about, remove audio at will, toggle controls off, and even export/share certain moments you captured online with others, as text, audio, or even an image.
- The biggest win for me is the integrations that have been introduced for Slack, your browsers, Notion, Linear, and even Figma apps. This primarily allows you to continue where you left off on these apps wherever you see a search result linked to an app. That’s insane!
Final Thoughts?
- I like that Rewind has been intentional about defining their product segment. Granted, the focus has been on meetings and recalling details off it because of Dan’s Scribe history (but that’s just the tip of the application’s capabilities), yet by having a very specific target customer segment in mind with their current product (supporting Apple M1 or M2 Silicon), they’re setting the bar for what the experience should be, and who their ideal customer is. It’s very conscious product market fit, allowing them to segment even before doing any actual segmentation is done. This strategy though a necessary technical decision, also shows how the founders have approached their GTM run.
- Also worth talking about is Dan blowing up the internet with his unconventional approach to funding that saw him net over 1,000 preliminary offers and an enormous Series A valuation. He asked Venture Capitalists to submit their best offer in an online form. It’s wild and remarkably genius. Read all about it from his own mouth here:
- My biggest peeve right now is having to wait out what Rewind could potentially become. Imagine if we could have it on all our screens at the same time, everyday; think your smartwatch, your TV, your smartphones, all remembering everything you ever consume and input everywhere, all the time. Yep, scary too. But that’s eventually where Rewind is going to be – growing into something even bigger, smarter, and more in tune with our lives.
Rewind truly is an amazing productivity software, and I'm so excited to see where it goes from here. Clip-on chest camera? Count me in!
Fun fact: Rewind automatically captures text in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Ukrainian, including any macOS system language setting.
TLDR;
RewindAi is a new software that records everything on your computer, including keystrokes, images, videos, and audio, using advanced image and speech recognition.
The software stores everything locally on your Apple M1 and M2 devices and is designed to be virtually imperceptible to users who can search for anything they've seen, said, or heard.
The software is particularly useful for recalling specifics from meetings and presentations; using every aspect of your computer's silicon without taxing system resources.
Rewind is a powerful tool that can be unsettling, but users have testified to its extreme functionality and how easy it fits into their lives.
It’s simple: Make money, build relationships, and expand your mind. OR Argue politics, thirst trap, and send shade.
End.
Weekly Product Find
With every post, I’ll share (a) remarkable product/s I discovered that may be a game-changer in its space:
- TECH HER AFRICA (https://www.techherfrica.org/) – nonprofit connecting female traders in rural Africa with digital tools that grant them assess to international buyers and markets online.
- BILIBILITV (https://www.bilibili.tv/) - watch videos online free via various channels of user uploaded content.
