Rewind AI: This Mac app is your context-aware assistant 

While there are tens of AI assistants you can deploy, most of them lack something crucial: context. I mean, how can AI help you if it can’t understand what you do? On that note, won’t it be awesome if the AI can see what you do on your computer while listening to everything going on around? This is what Rewind AI brings to your Mac.

What is Rewind, and How it Works

Rewind AI is a groundbreaking, install-and-forget application designed to provide a complete, context-rich AI assistant experience. It constantly captures your Mac’s screen, records microphone and system audio, and compresses everything locally for privacy. This allows Rewind to have an unparalleled understanding of your daily digital life.

Rewind’s functionality is driven by two primary components:

The first component is the one that records the screen and audio of your Mac. This will then compress the entire thing and store everything locally on your device. According to Rewind, this data never leaves your Mac. So, you don’t have to worry about someone else accessing your microphone recordings or screen-sharing info.

The other component is the AI engine that can intelligently search and let you know what you were doing in everything. There are two primary functions.

One, you can search Rewind to find screenshots that contain the thing that you search for. The second thing is an AI ask feature where an LLM will help you understand and come up with insightful info based on your recordings. However, when you use Ask Rewind features like meeting summarization, some text-based data will be sent to the LLM partners.

These components work together to make Rewind AI a true, context-aware AI assistant.

Rewind AI Review

After a week of thoroughly testing Rewind AI on our M2 MacBook Air, we found it consistently contributed to our workflow while running quietly in the background.

Getting started

Installation was remarkably straightforward. A quick download from the official site and a few necessary permissions had us up and running in minutes. The app primarily lives in the menu bar, and since most functions are local, you don’t even need an account for core usage (though a paid subscription requires one).

Core features & our use cases with Rewind

Comprehensive History Search

In many ways, Rewind AI works as a complete backup of whatever you’re doing. But unlike a typical backup that you take using something like Time Machine, Rewind AI lets you search through any of it. Let’s say that I was writing about a particular product, and I want to know where I was doing all these things.

So instead of going through multiple documents and applications, I can use the search function on Rewind AI to find out whenever this word or this product is mentioned. It gives me a very interactive UI consisting of all the instances of the word, and I can go back to that particular screenshot to understand what happens.

Because Rewind AI takes screenshots every once in a while, you get a complete picture of what you were doing on a particular application or throughout the day. The Search interface lets me filter results based on apps and meetings as well. You can also find your favorite moments using the Star function.

AI-powered Assistant

Rewind AI works as a powerful AI-powered assistant as well, where it uses the GPT-4 engine to understand what you have been doing on your Mac and give you descriptive and actionable info. So, as you can see on this interface, I’m asking Rewind: what have I been doing with this thing called Rewind?

Rewind AI is smart enough to give me an answer that not only tells me what I have done but also provides some insights based on the activities. Similarly, you can ask multiple things about your workflow or the applications that you have been using to get summaries.

Let’s say that you want to create a report of what you have been doing in relation to one particular project. The Ask Rewind feature will help you come up with well-crafted responses that you can use on the go. Keep in mind that this function will share your data with LLM partners, though.

Meeting Recording

As I said earlier, Rewind AI not only captures the screen but also records the microphone along with system audio. This means the tool can record a meeting regardless of whether you are hosting it. It does so without adding those annoying bots to Google Meet or Zoom.

We tested this feature, and Rewind AI did a great job at content transcription. Because Rewind AI can record audio from a microphone and the system, it can help you capture meeting content even from not-so-popular meeting apps. Once the recording is done, you can use other features to access this data. Or, you can go back and listen to these meetings with precise time stamps.

For instance, you can ask Rewind AI to draft an email or come up with shareable meeting notes. The meeting notes from Rewind AI can include information from documents/images shown on the screen as well. We’re really impressed by the transcription/content analysis capacity of the Rewind AI engines.

In the end, we believe the core features of Rewind AI offer so much value. We also liked how customizable all these features are. For instance, you get to decide what happens when you join a meeting. Similarly, the function of connecting the calendar to the Rewind AI app can make things easier during a busy schedule.

System Performance & Impact

Rewind AI does a lot of things in the background, even when you don’t see it running. So you might wonder about its impact on system performance. We must hand it to the developers behind Rewind for keeping it so energy-efficient. In our experience, Rewind AI does not consume a lot of system resources.

However, we see a slight bump in RAM usage at times. However, this usage does not impact how we use the Mac otherwise. Even while handling multiple documents on various apps, Rewind kept recording, and all the details were available to us later.

Rewind AI uses some of the best compression engines to store the captured screenshots and audio. Thanks to this, we had less than 2GB of data even after using the recording function for a whole week. The app says it will use around 14GB of data per month, but you can limit the retention period to save storage space.

Privacy & Security

You may also have some privacy and security concerns while using the app. To be clear, the app does not store any of its data on the cloud. Everything is stored locally, and only a bit of text-based data is transferred when you want to use the Ask Rewind features.

In addition, you have better control over how the recording works. For instance, you can set up Rewind to exclude applications that you don’t want to be recorded. Similarly, it has a default function that prevents data from being recorded from incognito and private windows for popular browsers like Chrome, Safari, Arc, etc.
Overall, Rewind AI has achieved a decent balance between features and AI. So, unless you mind LLMs having access to some bit of your data, you can use Rewind AI worry-free.

Availability & Pricing

Rewind AI is available for macOS and iOS, with a Windows version coming soon.

A free plan offers core recording, but for limitless AI, search, and meeting features, the Rewind Pro plan is $19/month. A 30-day free trial of Rewind Pro is available to experience its full capabilities.

Pros of Rewind AI

• Comprehensive capture and recall with deep macOS integration.
• Reliable AI assistant for summarization and insights.
• Intuitive UI design.
• Minimal system resource impact.
• Primarily local data storage for privacy.

Cons of Rewind AI

• Some AI assistant features involve sharing limited data with LLM partners.
• Free version has limited AI assistant features.

Our Final Take

After testing all its core features for over a week, we believe Rewind AI is a sweet choice for most users, especially those who, like us, manage a lot of digital information daily and struggle with recall. Its ability to keep track of everything you do on your Mac and help you interact with that information is transformative.

If you want to extend this “listening power” beyond the desktop, Rewind AI’s developer, Limitless AI, also offers the Limitless Pendant. This smart wearable captures and analyzes real-world audio, providing actionable insights for meetings and daily conversations. The company plans to integrate many of Rewind’s features into the Limitless platform, offering a broader suite of AI-powered memory tools.