Rewind is a Mac app coming soon that promises to create a searchable, rewindable index of everything you read online, write in conversation, work on or even say in meetings.
We’ve all had this happen: you remember seeing something that you want to share, but you don’t remember where you saw it nor enough details to find it on the internet. Rewind promises to make everything that you’ve “seen, said or heard” searchable.
Have you ever wished you could go back and hear an exact quote from a meeting? Have you ever scrolled down and down a Facebook feed trying to find something you saw just yesterday? Have you ever lost something you copied with the clipboard (⌘C) just minutes ago? Rewind will solve all of these problems.
Rewind is a new app — currently in beta — from entrepreneur Dan Siroker, the co-founder and former chief executive of Optimizely, and Brett Bejcek. The pair have formed a startup backed by the blue-chip Silicon Valley investment firm, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
How does it work?
Image: Rewind AI, Inc.
If you’ve ever made a screen recording before, you know that (a) it can really tax your computer’s resources and (b) the file sizes are huge. How does Rewind make it work? They have a few key technologies at their disposal.
To keep data storage manageable, they use some powerful algorithms to achieve up to 3,750× data compression — turning 10.5 GB recordings into a 2.8 MB index.
This means that you don’t have to sync to any cloud servers or let anyone else see your most private data. It can all fit on your Mac, no matter what Mac you have, so it’s private by design.
To keep Rewind from bogging down your system, they use native macOS APIs everywhere they can. Rewind is built for Apple silicon; according to Co-Founder & CEO Dan Siroker, they “utilize virtually every part of the System on a Chip.”
And it’s not just the text you see on the screen. Rewind leverages technology from Scribe, another venture of Siroker’s, which uses “state-of-the-art Automated Speech Recognition” to add transcripts of meetings, too.
See it all in action
In their brief demo, Dan searches the phrase “TPS report” (reference acknowledged) to (a) find a spoken use of the phrase from a Zoom meeting, (b) clicks to see the screen recording from the meeting, and (c) clicks a URL visible in the browser to find the document he was looking for.
When can you get it?
Rewind is currently in limited availability to early access users. You can sign up here to reserve a spot in line when it is more broadly available.
