Remember what you have forgotten
I’ve been using Rewind.ai for the last couple of weeks continuously during my work day and been quite impressed with the results it delivers.
Overview of Rewind.ai’s features
As a reminder, Rewind.ai takes a screenshot of your Mac every two seconds and analyzes its content by extracting text. Furthermore, it can capture your microphone input or speaker output and store this information both as an audio track as well as text via speech-to-text technology. This input is stored in a continuous way, so that you can scroll back in time to see what you did in the past. Everything is processed locally, that’s why it’s restricted to Apple’s powerful M-series of chips.
Performance penalty of Rewind.ai
I’m using a MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro processor. When using Rewind.ai, the fans sometimes spin for a couple of minutes. But other than that, I didn’t notice any performance penalty. To give you more context, I’m a Full Stack developer, which means I use Docker and VS Code heavily on a daily basis.Furthermore, I’m using a 5K monitor, which means the media data that Rewind.ai stores is quite large.
How much storage Rewind.ai takes up
Nevertheless, the application works basically flawlessly. I discovered a bug during my initial usage, where the service used exorbitant amounts of storage, but that was quickly fixed. Now Rewind.ai creates about 20 GB during a single month. The Rewind.ai-team was extremely quick in responding to my feedback and bug report and a couple of days it was actually fixed via a new release.
How Rewind.ai actually helped me
I think the best example of how the app helped me was when I needed to recall a terminal command that I used during an ephemeral SSH session. Instead of going through my browser’s history to find the page with the documentation, I simply opened Rewind.ai, typed in one part of the command I remembered, and it found the screen with the full command! Amazingly, this whole process took only a couple of seconds. This proved to me that Rewind.ai’s promise is actually true, and you can find something you did in the past reliably and fast.
Another example is that I played a song on Spotify, but didn’t remember the name later and also couldn’t find it in my search history. With Rewind.ai, I actually could scroll back in time when I was using Spotify to see what I was typing then.
Rewind.ai for meetings
It’s also a really nice companion to have during meetings. For Zoom conferences, it automatically starts recording the microphone and speaker tracks, which is handy. For Google Meet, I have to enable and disable it myself. The speech-to-text service is not always 100% accurate, but good enough. Furthermore, I have the audio track to replay as well.
Conclusion
I really enjoy using Rewind.ai, as it doesn’t slow down my device during recording, but can greatly help in those specific situations where you can’t remember exactly what you did. Having documentation of everything you do on the device is therefore a really powerful feature.
