The new Mac app wants to record everything you do so you can “rewind” it later

Yesterday, a company called Rewind AI announced a self-titled software product for Macs running Apple Silicon that reportedly saves a highly compressed, searchable record of everything you do locally on your Mac and allows you to “rewind” time around it show later. If you forget something you “saw, said, or heard,” Rewind wants to help you find it easily.

Rewind AI claims that its product stores all recording data locally on your computer and requires no cloud integration. Among other things, Rewind promises that you can rewind Zoom meetings and pull information from them in searchable form.

In a video demo on Rewind.AI’s website, the app opens when a user presses Command+Shift+Spacebar. The search bar suggests typing “everything you’ve seen, said, or heard.” It also shows a timeline at the bottom of the screen that represents past actions in apps.

After searching for “tps reports”, the video shows a grid view of every time Rewind encountered the phrase “tps reports” as audio or text in any app, including zoom chats, text messages, emails, Slack conversations and Word documents. It describes filtering the results by app – and the ability to copy and paste from those earlier instances if needed.

Founded by Dan Siroker and Brett Bejcek, Rewind AI consists of a small remote team located in various cities across the US. Portions of the company previously developed Scribe, a precursor to Rewind that garnered some press attention in 2021. In an introductory blog post, Dan Siroker, co-founder of Rewind AI, writes, “What if we could use technology to expand our memory in the same way that a hearing aid can improve our hearing?”

How does it work?

Rewind AI provides few details about the app’s back-end technology, but describes an “amazing compression” that can reportedly compress recording data up to 3,750 times “without much loss in quality” and gives an example of 10.5GB of compressed data only 2.8 MB. Rewind says that even a small hard drive “can store years of recordings” — a heady claim, to be sure.

The Rewind site also describes using OCR to capture text content and automated speech recognition to automatically transcribe everything you’ve said or heard, even in meetings, so “you never have to worry about losing that content again.”

(If Rewind turns everything it sees and hears into plain text, that could explain the massive compression ratio. For example, the demo didn’t show live video or recorded audio playback, just static screenshots with highlighted text. We asked Rewind AI to clarify this point and update the article when we get a reply.)

Rewind AI also says Apple’s Silicon Macs with M1 and M2 chips are key to the product’s “virtually imperceptible operation” and utilizing “virtually every part of the system-on-a-chip.”

Possible privacy issues

While laying out the vision for Rewind AI in the aforementioned blog post, Siroker writes, “Our vision is to give people a perfect memory.” But commenters continue Twitter and YouTube have already started pointing out scenarios where “perfect memory” could backfire.

For example, Rewind could expose its users to potential abuse from overbearing partners, bosses, Prosecutionor repressive governments; legal issues from recording sensitive information; and Consent Questions to add other people to meetings.

Rewind addresses some of these concerns on its website, saying, “We store all recordings locally on your Mac. Only you have access to it.” The demo site also says you can pause or delete recordings at any time and automatically exclude certain apps from your recorded history, including private browsing modes in browsers.

Regarding getting permission to record a meeting with other attendees, Rewind has its own help page called Everything You Need to Know About Consent, which offers advice such as “Before you record someone, you should always ask for their consent ask” contains. The site recommends letting people know the meeting will be recorded — perhaps in advance — and that users follow all local laws regarding the recording of conversations.

Privacy and ethical concerns aside, Andreessen Horowitz takes technology seriously enough to lead a $10 million funding round valued at $75 million. The venture capital firm wrote about their reasons for investing in Rewind, touting the product as a cure for information overload.

The Rewind product is not currently publicly available, but anyone interested can request early access on the Rewind website. We reached out to Rewind and asked for a chance to try the software.