Hello curious people,
Have you ever dreamed about being able to search through everything you have ever done? Well, now you can. At least for the digital stuff. Today we are going to explore another powerful tool that’s powered by AI - Rewind.AI.
Disclaimer: I am Not affiliated with Rewind.AI in any way and am paying the full price of the service for testing purposes.
Today we are going to look at:
What is Rewind.AI
The technology behind it
How we can use it
It’s shortcomings
Pricing
Alternatives
Before we go any further I must warn you. This tool is currently only available on Apple Silicon. (Mac’s with M1 or M2 chips)
The search engine for everything
So what exactly does this tool do? Once you have it installed, it will record data on everything you do on your computer (Don't worry the data is stored locally, and you can choose to exclude stuff).
By using a keyboard shortcut, you can access a search bar. This also brings up a scrollable timeline interface.
Here’s a short demo:
The main thing this tool does - It makes everything on your computer searchable. All the apps are accessible from on singular, easy-to-use search bar.
Let’s dive deeper.
How we can use it
These days each and every one of us use multiple apps daily. For communication, research, or whatever that is you are doing in the digital realm. And sometimes it can get quite frustrating.
It’s easy to get lost in the sea of endless information available at our fingertips. And RewindAI does a great job at making all of it easier to manage.
Slack, Discord, Whatsapp, Gmail, or whatever you used to send a particular message, you can now access all of these and more through one simple search.
You can even re-open chrome tabs. And record audio transcripts of Zoom meetings or Youtube videos and search through those.
Sometimes a great idea from a meeting, or a video can be lost forever. Well, now if you remember something about it, you can search for it.
Top Use Cases
Research - A great way to find particular sources if you forgot to save them
Meeting notes - You can search through transcripts of your Zoom meetings if you have recorded the session (Ask for consent of participants for being recorded)
Learning - While learning stuff online you can easily jump back into a certain topic. Whether you are looking at a text-based tutorial, Youtube video, or even a 1 on 1 session on Zoom.
Reopening work sessions - You can easily re-open chrome tabs where you left off using rewind.
The tech behind
Let’s look at what makes all of this possible.
The first issue to tackle is privacy. For all of this to work without raising significant privacy concerns everything needs to be stored on your device. And to store the files locally and not clog up all of your hard drive space compression needs to be great.
Compression
RewindAI states to have achieved a compression rate of 3,750x times without significant loss of quality. And that is quite impressive.
I have been using the app for a little over two months and the data is taking up around 70GB of hard drive space. (I use the computer A LOT) But the data surely adds up. And at this rate, I wouldn’t be willing to give up storage to store the data forever.
But keeping around about a month or two of data could be a good compromise of keeping the most up-to-date and relevant information accessible and not taking up too much valuable storage.
Considering I can scroll back to any point in time and see exactly what I saw on my screen. As well as search through all of it. I can see where the data adds up.
Processing
Rewind is made to work on Apple silicon specifically. Here’s an excerpt from their own blog post as to why:
Rewind is designed for Apple Silicon (M1 and M2) chips. These chips have a System on a Chip (SoC) architecture which allows software (like Rewind) to offload processing to special purpose components of the chip (like machine learning inference), and NOT rely exclusively on the CPU
And from personal experience, I can easily say that I didn’t experience any slowdown of the system even while using the tool on the Macbook Air M1 base model.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
Rewind AI utilizes native MacOS APIs in combination with Optical Character Recognition. This is what enables Rewind AI to search through any app you are using.
They are using the same thing that enables you to interact (copy/paste, search) with text in your photos on iPhone and Mac.
Speech Recognition
To make audio searchable it first needs to be transcribed and for this Rewind utilizes one of OpenAI’s models. The model I am talking about is called Whisper, and you can check it out here. I would say it’s pretty impressive.
Here’s an excerpt from OpenAI’s blog:
Whisper is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data collected from the web. We show that the use of such a large and diverse dataset leads to improved robustness to accents, background noise and technical language. Moreover, it enables transcription in multiple languages, as well as translation from those languages into English. We are open-sourcing models and inference code to serve as a foundation for building useful applications and for further research on robust speech processing.
That covers the most important technical aspects of the app. If you are interested to dig deeper, here’s an article I recommend reading.
Let’s move on to what’s not so great about Rewind.
Drawbacks
Security risks
The main issue with rewind is security. And although all the data is stored locally, there are still concerns.
First of all, you have to trust Rewind.AI. (I see no reason not to) But if I was working with highly sensitive data, I probably wouldn’t consider something like this anyway.
Then you also have the possibility of someone gaining access to your device, they will also be able to search through everything you’ve done. (with the exceptions you have set) but at that point, you are probably in trouble with or without Rewind.
This issue could possibly be solved with on-device encryption of data.
Storage
While the compression is great. The amount of data adds up. And if you want to store the data forever, you will have to sacrifice a lot of storage space. 70GB for two months of heavy use is impressive, but I wouldn’t be willing to spare 350GB of space for a year of data. Especially with Apple’s pricing of storage space upgrades.
Apart from these things, I don’t see any issues with the app and I do believe It can increase productivity a lot.
Pricing
Currently, there is one pricing plan and it’s $20 a month. However, there is also a 30-day Free Trial available. And the tool is worth checking out. Remember - it’s only available on Apple silicon.
I believe they are still settling on their pricing. The app is new. When I started my free trial the monthly plan was $40 a month. Maybe we will see different pricing models in the future.
Is it worth it for $20 a month? I don’t know. It depends on how much you use it. For some, it will be worthwhile, for others not. But if you find it interesting give the free trial a go.
Alternatives
As for alternatives, I am currently not aware of a single app that does something similar to RewindAI. There are tools out there like Otter.Ai that let you transcribe your meetings.
But I haven’t seen anything that incorporates as many features as RewindAI.
Final Words
It’s great to see AI-enabled technologies change the way we go about our everyday tasks. And the features offered by RewindAI feel intuitive and natural. It feels like something you should be able to do on your computer.
In other words - I like the app and am looking forward to seeing how it evolves. The developers are actively improving the app. You can check out the changelog here. And other people on Twitter who have tried the app seem to share the sentiment.
That’s it for today!
Stay curious and stay HungryMinded!