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Rewind: The Search Engine for Your Life

164 pointsby mxstbrover 2 years ago

35 comments

timfrietasover 2 years ago
I&#x27;ve been a beta tester for a few weeks now. And as a Search and Discovery person I have plenty of granular feedback and feature requests for Dan, Brett and team that I still owe :)<p>Overall it has helped me in a couple situations. I will say when I was onboarded I don&#x27;t believe audio was mentioned and a quick search for things I know I said in Zoom recently comes up empty--perhaps that functionality is new?<p>For now, I&#x27;ve found that I haven&#x27;t yet hit the equilibrium point where I&#x27;ve forgotten something badly enough to replace my instinct to use Spotlight, browse Finder, or even search Google Drive (<i>shudders</i>). The Fitness app on iOS needs 180 days of data before it shows you trends; I feel like Rewind is similar in that I need a critical mass of data and time before I truly don&#x27;t know where to look and go to Rewind first. Audio support would greatly reduce that window, however, so maybe I am missing out.<p>Overall I definitely recommend trying it out, however!
singhshashiover 2 years ago
Congratulations on the launch! Looks fantastic! I have built a product <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gettrici.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gettrici.com</a> that records your screen and stores the recordings locally as well. As a developer, watching a quick replay of my recording helps me recover my lost train of thought very very fast and saves me a ton of time. [ Show HN Post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29277671" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29277671</a> ]<p>Its great that you have leveraged the power of Apple Silicon to analzye and index the recordings as well as keeping the size of the recordings very very small. Do you see this becoming available for Intel Chipsets a.k.a Windows and Linux anytime soon?
shubhamjainover 2 years ago
Claim: For your privacy, we store all of the recordings locally on your Mac. Only you have access to them.<p>From the docs:<p>&gt; Video data is never sent off your Mac. The only data sent to a cloud service is the audio. We send it to a cloud transcription service in order to generate a transcript of what was said. This transcript is created so you can read it and search for specific words that were said. [1]<p>Yeah, we only &quot;store locally&quot;, but hey, that doesn&#x27;t stop us from sending it to a third party service for transcription. I was already uncomfortable with the idea of being voice recorded. Reading between the lines of how it works doesn&#x27;t inspire a ton of confidence.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.rewind.ai&#x2F;en&#x2F;articles&#x2F;6526620-recording-meetings-with-rewind" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.rewind.ai&#x2F;en&#x2F;articles&#x2F;6526620-recording-meeting...</a>
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Toineover 2 years ago
Feels great to see ambitious products like these pop up every now and then. I feel like there are too many boring startups nowadays. Yes, there&#x27;s a big brother feel to it, but I believe it&#x27;s a feature, not a bug. Otherwise it might not be innovative enough...<p>Edit : do you hire EU citizens ? :)<p>Edit edit : most of the world doesn&#x27;t use macOS : what&#x27;s your long-term vision for non Apple silicon users ? On smartphones ? Any plan on a hardware product that literally records everything you say ?
8enover 2 years ago
I really admire the ambition of this product. I&#x27;ve noticed how much I use the internet as a &quot;second brain&quot;. Being able to quickly get back to things would improve my life.<p>The UI also looks very good for a first version. Excited to give this a try!
igammaraysover 2 years ago
Looks like this idea was inspired by a Show HN that appeared last year [1]. Seems the original inventor of the concept didn&#x27;t even realize what it could become, or didn&#x27;t have the funding to make it happen.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27965979" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27965979</a><p>Also, I called it out that time, I knew this was going to be huge: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27965979#27970968" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27965979#27970968</a>
thundergolferover 2 years ago
This looks awesome. <i>The Entire History of You</i> is my favorite Black Mirror episode and yet I still want this personal search functionality and much more.
justinlloydover 2 years ago
Interesting product. I will take a wait and see approach though because my trust of companies pinky promising not to upload my data, especially when dealing with such invasive data as camera and audio and screen recordings, has been wearing thin of late.<p>I&#x27;ve been recording my desktop on Mac, Windows and Linux, recording audio in my office, including transcription of the audio, and multiple camera capture for over a decade since early 2000&#x27;s, and using a SenseCam-like device, on-and-off, for almost 20 years. My current setup of an NVidia Jetson does an admirable job of determining if one or more people are in the room, the activity they are engaged in, multiple camera angles, transcribing what is being said, music identification, desktop image capture and OCR of the images is very much kept locally and I can be assured nothing is leaking out without my explicit knowledge. I have a custom device on my desk that I built that can &quot;pause the recording&quot; or &quot;forget the last 30 seconds&quot; or &quot;forget the last five minutes&quot; for those events that probably shouldn&#x27;t be captured, e.g. I&#x27;m picking my nose and carefully inspecting whatever was retrieved.
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gardenfelderover 2 years ago
This seems pretty cool. There&#x27;s an OSS platform [1] which is nowhere near as powerful, but on the same path<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;memex.garden&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;memex.garden&#x2F;</a>
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theropostover 2 years ago
I&#x27;ve started some work on a similar project as well on Windows. We should be able to fully query our lives, and we should also be guaranteed that data is ours. I believe this is where data collection should go - your data is yours, and you own it. All the data that Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc collect on us, yet we have such limited access to it. This should be ours, and ours to analyse, search, and gain insights on in any way we wish. This should really be an open-source, community project as well - tools, analytics, apps, all made to help you be a better version of yourself.
mlajtosover 2 years ago
The compression rate seems like a magic. Surprised nobody talks about that point...<p>Signed up for the beta. Really curious about it.
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danielovichdkover 2 years ago
I would rather have everything deleted by default. But with an option to opt in for saving things locally.
flyingskyover 2 years ago
Looks interesting but also seems kinda creepy
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mcastover 2 years ago
Side note the landing page with it&#x27;s hard gradients and shadows looks like something from the late 2000s when you would buy Mac apps without the App Store
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dsirokerover 2 years ago
I&#x27;m Dan, co-founder &amp; CEO of Rewind.<p>I am eternally grateful to Hacker News for helping me launch my first startup, Optimizely (YC W10), so I’m back here to launch my second one: Rewind.<p>Rewind is the search engine for your life. Check it out: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rewind.ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rewind.ai</a><p>It’s a macOS app that enables you to find anything you’ve seen, said, or heard.<p>We’re also announcing that we’ve raised $10m at a $75m valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz.<p>In case you are curious, the inspiration for Rewind came from an unlikely place:<p><i>Our founding story</i><p>I started to go deaf in my 20s. When I turned 30, a hearing aid changed my life. To lose a sense and gain it back again felt like gaining a superpower. Ever since that moment, I’ve been on a hunt for ways technology can augment human capabilities and give us superpowers.<p>That hunt ultimately led me to memory. Studies show that 90% of memories are forgotten after a week. Just like our hearing, our memory gets worse as we get older. But does it have to? If we have hearing aids for hearing and glasses for vision, what’s the equivalent for memory?<p>What if we could use technology to augment our memory the same way a hearing aid can augment our hearing? This question is why we founded Rewind. Our vision is to give humans perfect memory.<p><i>Introducing Rewind</i><p>Here’s how it works:<p>1. Local and Private By Design: We record anything you’ve seen, said, or heard and make it searchable. For your privacy, we store all of the recordings locally on your Mac. Only you have access to them. Learn more: &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.rewind.ai&#x2F;en&#x2F;collections&#x2F;3616305-privacy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.rewind.ai&#x2F;en&#x2F;collections&#x2F;3616305-privacy</a>&gt;<p>2. Mind-Boggling Compression: Storing all the recordings locally means compression is very important. We compress raw recording data up to 3,750x times without major loss of quality. For example, 10.5GB of raw recording data becomes 2.8MB. That means that even with the smallest hard drive you can buy from Apple today, you can store years of recordings.<p>3. No Cloud Integration or IT Required: In order to enable you to search for anything you’ve seen, we use native macOS APIs and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to recognize &amp; index all the words that appear on your screen. This means you don’t need to integrate with cloud products like Gmail, Dropbox, or Slack. Rewind starts capturing these apps right away, with no IT required. Also, OCR enables you to copy &amp; paste anything from your past.<p>4. Meetings: In order to enable you to search for anything you’ve said or heard, we use state-of-the-art Automated Speech Recognition (ASR). This is particularly useful for meetings, where the content of discussions, debates, and decisions are often lost forever as soon as a meeting is over. With Rewind, you never have to worry about losing this content again. Rewind can capture the content of meetings, including everything that is said and everything that is shared visually. All of the content is searchable. You can go back to the exact moment in a meeting you are looking for by simply searching for a word that was said or a word that appeared on your screen. Learn more: &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.rewind.ai&#x2F;en&#x2F;articles&#x2F;6526620-recording-meeting" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.rewind.ai&#x2F;en&#x2F;articles&#x2F;6526620-recording-meeting</a>&gt;<p>5. Unleashes Apple Silicon: The key enabling technology that makes Rewind possible is Apple Silicon. We utilize virtually every part of the System on a Chip (SoC) so that running Rewind doesn’t tax system resources (like CPU and memory) while it is recording. It feels virtually imperceptible.<p>Rewind is just the first step toward our vision of giving humans perfect memory.<p>Please share any and all feedback you might have! We’re all ears
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yewenjieover 2 years ago
Given that OpenAI Whisper is open source now, and pretty near SOTA, I think creating an audio only open-source version of this shouldn&#x27;t be difficult. However, I don&#x27;t know how to easily contextualise the audio - how would I search &#x27;name of the movie I was discussing with Zeynep last week&#x27;?
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jsf01over 2 years ago
The problem I have with this is that meetings and discussions—exactly the kind of thing you would want to recall—involve more parties than just yourself. But rewind appears designed to record everything in the background and be left on, not enabled manually when you want it. That means in every conversation you have you’re either going to need to get consent to record (which is super weird for 90% of quick chats) or just do it without consent which is creepy and probably illegal in a lot of places.
zxieninover 2 years ago
&gt; Mind-boggling compression<p>&gt; ..We compress raw recording data up to 3,750x times..<p>Richard Hendricks should&#x27;ve run &quot;Pied Piper&quot; with this use case :-)
mxuribeover 2 years ago
Well, if things don&#x27;t work out in this use-case, there&#x27;s always an opportunity to greatly evolve the tech industry with your compression. That resultant comprssion size sounds crazy amazing! Kudos to you and your team for your launch!
doganugurluover 2 years ago
Great concept! Love the time machine inspired UI for rewinding. And super-curious about the compression. My guess is it&#x27;s by saving diffs&#x2F;incremental changes to the screenshots using Computer Vision.
0x445442over 2 years ago
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.yale.edu&#x2F;homes&#x2F;freeman&#x2F;lifestreams.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.yale.edu&#x2F;homes&#x2F;freeman&#x2F;lifestreams.html</a>
iLoveOncallover 2 years ago
How much is it gonna cost? It better not be free because that would be a total deal breaker for me.<p>In any case, I may be wrong, but I don&#x27;t think anyone&#x27;s gonna install that on their computer.
brandrickover 2 years ago
Love the look of this. Looking forward to giving it a try.
marginalia_nuover 2 years ago
Kinda getting As We May Think vibes from this one.
zxieninover 2 years ago
&gt; For your privacy, we store all of the recordings locally on your Mac.<p>how does data transfer look like, when changing your mac?
giuliomagnificoover 2 years ago
Looks nice if the privacy is respected, but I wonder how much space can -for example- one week of “usage” takes?
onnnonover 2 years ago
IMO, this only accelerates the problem of memory loss. The phenomenon is known as &quot;digital dementia&quot; or &quot;digital amnesia&quot;. If you want to strengthen your memory, use less technology to remember things for you. If you already have memory problems, and need aid, I can see this being useful.
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lloydatkinsonover 2 years ago
What’s with the trend of mac only desktop software?
cshintovover 2 years ago
Great stuff! Wish you guys all the best! :)
fredsters_sover 2 years ago
been using the beta - really love it
DeathArrowover 2 years ago
Why Mac only?
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cmoogover 2 years ago
Not to be a FOSS-thumping loser, but an a16z backed company that records anything and everything on your screen sounds like a recipe for disaster. May as well set the countdown for the bait-and-switch.<p>Looks like a cool demo with neat tech though. Maybe someone will reimplement as OSS?
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photochemsynover 2 years ago
I think a better title would include &lt;Digitized&gt; before &lt;Life&gt;.<p>The problem with relying too much on things like photos to recall your memories of previous events is that typically the photos overwrite the actual memories, i.e. you lose your built-in record of sensory impressions of events.<p>Used sparingly, it&#x27;s probably okay, but working on improving your built-in memory is also a good idea (i.e. the whole memory palace approach).<p>This kind of thing could be a great aid for early-stage Alzheimer&#x27;s patients, however.<p>As far as being used for mass surveillance and social control by authoritarian states bent on managing their captive populations in some dystopian social-credit-scored plantation-labor system, well, I imagine the NSA&#x27;s DARPA-sourced &#x27;Total Information Awareness&quot; programs are well ahead of anything seen in public by now.
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paxysover 2 years ago
Demo looks cool, but a random startup recording everything I do on my computer, uploading it to the cloud and running OCR on it? No thanks.
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onnnonover 2 years ago
Dupe: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33420094" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33420094</a>
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