Microsoft's latest AI tool is called Recall, a Windows 11 feature that acts like your own personal AI assistant: It logs everything you do, every app you use, every meeting you attend, and every website you visit, all neatly accessible through a quick "Recall" action. And it's met quite the divide online. Excited or worried about Recall? We already know what to expect from the feature thanks to this third-party Mac app.
Rewind is dubbed "the search engine for your life." Fancy title, right? Using the muscle of Apple silicon, Rewind claims to compress and store mountains of audio and video recordings, making them searchable. Essentially, it's the lovechild of your diary and an audio-visual scrapbook, all kept securely on your Mac. No cloud prying eyes here.
What does Rewind do?
At its core, Rewind builds upon Scribe, a meeting-recording bot with a user base of 30,000. It's not just a handy app; it’s a surveillance system for your memories, cataloging every word and visual you encounter. Thanks to Apple’s hardware magic, Rewind can shrink 10.5GB of raw data to a svelte 2.8MB, meaning even the tiniest MacBook hard drive can hoard years of your digital life.
The selling point? Local storage. All your recordings stay on your Mac, safe from the clutches of cloud vulnerabilities. Using macOS’s APIs and Optical Character Recognition, Rewind indexes every word on your screen, paired with automated speech recognition to catch all your spoken words. This turns your daily digital chaos into a searchable archive.
It works very similarly to Window's Rewind. Microsoft's new feature is the reincarnation of Windows 10’s defunct Timeline, now supercharged with AI. Like Rewind, Recall logs every interaction on your Windows 11 device. Teams meetings, Excel spreadsheets, web browsing history – it’s all there, neatly packaged and accessible with a simple Recall action. And we know that it's going to work well since Rewind has been available on Macs for over two years.
As Apple’s WWDC 2024 looms, we’re expecting Apple's AI response. Rumors hint at new AI features in Notes and Safari, but what if they took a page out of Microsoft’s book? An Apple version of Recall could seamlessly meld with macOS, offering a privacy-focused, locally stored solution to complement Apple’s ecosystem. I'd love to see it built-in (as long as it's opt-in and can be switched off), rather than having to rely on a third-party app.
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