dsiroker

(Co-founder & CEO of Limitless) Thanks for trying it and I hope to win you back with the new features we have in the works!

As for selling data if consumers don’t want to pay for it: I commit publicly to never doing this. I will shutdown the company and return remaining capital to investors if consumers don’t want to pay for what we are building. So far, so good, and we were actually cash flow positive a few of the last few weeks.

(Co-founder of Optimizely here) Congrats! It was fun competing with you

Love your enthusiasm! Our plan is to subsume Rewind functionality into Limitless. Sorry it has taken longer than I wanted. The pendant has taken a lot of our time and focus.

That's why we are going to offer Consent Mode.

Consent Mode makes it possible for the first time ever to only capture the voice of people who have given consent to be recorded.

It uses voice identification to determine who is speaking and verbal opt-in to make it frictionless to ask for consent.

Here's a direct link to the timestamp of the announcement where we show how Consent Mode works: https://twitter.com/dsiroker/status/1779857843895599383?t=26...

Hardware is hard. We would have happily done this as a native iPhone or Watch app if it were possible. We explored that first. But, unfortunately both iOS and watchOS don't support it. In particular, anytime you listen to audio (a YouTube video, phone call, etc) it turns off the microphone and you have to remember to turn it back on.

Confidential Cloud is similar to end-to-end encryption, but with the added benefit of letting your personalized AI work for you even when you aren’t using the app.

You control who can decrypt your data

Your employer, we as software providers, and the government cannot decrypt your data without your permission, even with a subpoena to do so.

Your data is anonymized

There is an initial mapping from your application request to an anonymous ID, but after that, even we don't know whose encrypted data is whose.

Your data will never be sold

Not only do we pledge never to sell your data, but we couldn't even if we wanted to because we can't decrypt it without your permission.

Envelope encryption with unique secret keys

Data keys are used to encrypt your data and are themselves encrypted under a secret key. No one, including us, can export the secret keys.

Tamperproof hardware

Decrypted data is only ever stored in memory (source: <https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kms/latest/cryptographic-details...>), which is protected from tampering by a multi-chip standalone hardware cryptographic appliance (source: <https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/cryptographic-module-validati...>).

Protected from 3rd party AI providers

Data sent to 3rd party AI providers for transcription and summarization is anonymized, not used for training, and deleted after 30 days.

Protected from cloud provider and subpoena

AWS KMS (source: <https://aws.amazon.com/kms/>) uses FIPS 140-2 (source: <https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/projects/cryptographic-modu...>) validated hardware security modules (HSMs) to ensure no one, including AWS employees, can retrieve your plaintext KMS keys.

We wouldn’t be where we are today without our existing customers, so all Rewind Pro subscribers get Limitless Pro for free.

We are shifting our focus to Limitless because we think it’s a better approach to solving the same problems. In fact, we plan to implement many of your favorite Rewind features directly in Limitless.

We are so bullish on Limitless that we decided to change our company name from Rewind to Limitless.

That said, we have no plans to stop supporting Rewind.

You can even use both products side-by-side and decide for yourself which one you like better.

(I'm the co-founder & CEO of Limitless)

We are so honored this hit the front page of HN!

Here's the video announcement: https://twitter.com/dsiroker/status/1779857843895599383

And timestamps to moments in the video you might be interested in:

0:06 Reveal

0:48 Why Limitless?

1:39 Demo

3:05 Pendant

4:27 Privacy

5:23 Confidential Cloud

6:36 Rewind

7:12 Roadmap

9:25 Vision

Thanks for the feedback! Do you think this qualifies as a credible answer? If not, what more can we offer to rebuild your trust in us?

https://twitter.com/dsiroker/status/1709605449253974352

(co-founder & CEO of Rewind here)

I'd really love to share more but our competitors will try to imitate it and I want to build as large of a lead as I can before we unveil it.

I'll just say: it is fundamental to the product experience, not a bolt on.

(Rewind CEO here) I’ve been at this for a while: https://x.com/dsiroker/status/1708997628506292255

It’s been 14 years since my first submission to HN and I am so grateful to this community for all your feedback & help on my first company (Optimizely) and now my second one (Rewind). Today we’re introducing Rewind for iPhone - a truly personalized AI in your pocket. I’d love your feedback!

Browse & search for any word you’ve seen (including screenshots)

- Rewind automatically captures what you read in Safari and imports your screenshots.

- You can preserve & search for anything you’ve seen on your iPhone.

- This opens a new dimension of computing: time.

Summarize and ask any question using AI

- Rewind integrates with OpenAI GPT-4 to allow you to ask any question about anything you’ve seen.

- Create summaries, synthesize information across apps, or remind yourself how you know someone.

Private by design

- Private browsing in Safari is not captured.

- Using GPT-4 is optional and only the relevant text necessary to answer your question is used.

- Your data is not used to train AI models.

- All recordings are stored locally and only you have access to them.

Learn more: https://www.rewind.ai

Please let me know what you think!

Thanks for the feedback!

On Mac: you are right that recording audio causes your notifications to be hidden by default. There is an OS setting to change that behavior. Here's how to change it: https://help.rewind.ai/en/articles/7039599-what-are-the-limi...

On pricing: you are also right. We are thinking about new pricing & packaging that feels fairer. We're thinking about doing purely feature-based package differentiation (as opposed to tracking number of "rewinds"). Would love your thoughts or suggestions.

On muscle memory: again, you are right. Some of our users think of our product today as mostly insurance and don't actively use it every day. We hope to change that by giving them valuable things that fit into their existing daily workflow (e.g. summarizing meetings, telling you how you know the person you are about to meet with, proactively drafting emails for you based on context)

It’s been 14 years since my first submission to HN and I am so grateful to this community for all your feedback & help on my first company (Optimizely) and now my second one (Rewind). Today we’re introducing Rewind for iPhone - a truly personalized AI in your pocket. I’d love your feedback!

Browse & search for any word you’ve seen (including screenshots)

- Rewind automatically captures what you read in Safari and imports your screenshots.

- You can preserve & search for anything you’ve seen on your iPhone.

- This opens a new dimension of computing: time.

Summarize and ask any question using AI

- Rewind integrates with OpenAI GPT-4 to allow you to ask any question about anything you’ve seen.

- Create summaries, synthesize information across apps, or remind yourself how you know someone.

Private by design

- Private browsing in Safari is not captured.

- Using GPT-4 is optional and only the relevant text necessary to answer your question is used.

- Your data is not used to train AI models.

- All recordings are stored locally and only you have access to them.

Please let me know what you think!

(I’m the co-founder & CEO of Rewind.)

While it’s true we raised money from VCs we did not give them a board seat or voting control. I have super-voting shares and am the only member of the board. We will never be pushed around by VCs.

Our vision is to give humans perfect memory and we will not let VCs get in the way.

Agreed! It also incorporates goal setting and time boxing, which are critical.

The key enabling technology that makes Rewind possible is Apple Silicon [0]. 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.

[0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-unleashes-m1/

You are right, it's a bit too aspirational right now. The "everything you say" part is just for Zoom meetings right now. Once we implement local transcription with OpenAI Whisper then I think it makes sense to expand beyond meetings to things like YouTube videos, Podcasts, Audiobooks, or anything else you might want to search by "what you've heard".

I got OpenAI Whisper running locally on my Mac but the plumbing to make it NOT tax system resources (like CPU) and to get it to work with search isn't trivial. It's on our roadmap.

If you are more comfortable removing the word Rewind and changing:

"This meeting is important to me so I want to make sure I don't forget what we discussed. Is it ok with you if I use Rewind to record and transcribe the meeting? For our privacy, all data is stored securely on my Mac and not in the cloud."

to

"This meeting is important to me so I want to make sure I don't forget what we discussed. Is it ok with you if I record and transcribe the meeting? For our privacy, all data is stored securely on my Mac and not in the cloud."

by all means go ahead.

We don't upload the recordings to the cloud.

All OCR is done locally on your Mac.

The reason we wrote that article is to be 100% transparent about what happens to your data. No reading between the lines necessary.

The only time this cloud-based transcription is used is during a Zoom meeting, which is already in the cloud.

When you join a new Zoom Meeting we prompt you to ask if you want to record & transcribe the audio. You can choose to do this selectively for each meeting, or not record & transcribe any of them if you aren't comfortable with cloud-based transcription.

That said, we do plan to move away from cloud-based transcription, likely with Whisper from OpenAI.

Rewind | Remote | U.S. | Full-time | Engineering / Design / Customer Success | https://www.rewind.ai/

We're on the front page of HN right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33421751

At Rewind, our vision is to give humans perfect memory. We believe a world in which you can easily recall anything you’re looking for unlocks the potential of human productivity. That’s why we built Rewind: the search engine for your life. It’s a macOS app that records anything you’ve seen, said, or heard and makes it searchable. For your privacy, we store all of the recordings locally on your Mac and only you have access to them. Instead of spending hours searching in different tools for that piece of information you desperately need, you can now find what you’re looking for in seconds with Rewind.

The product we have today is just the first step toward our audacious vision of giving humans perfect memory. We have raised over $15m from top-tier investors including Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, Sam Altman, Elad Gil, and Alexis Ohanian to help make that vision a reality.

Please apply at https://www.rewind.ai/careers

Before you record someone you should always ask for their consent. This is especially important with Rewind, since the recording happens on your Mac and other meeting participants won't know they are being recorded unless you inform them.

How should I ask for consent?

Here is how we recommend you ask for consent:

"This meeting is important to me so I want to make sure I don't forget what we discussed. Is it ok with you if I use Rewind to record and transcribe the meeting? For our privacy, all data is stored securely on my Mac and not in the cloud."

In addition to saying this verbally, we recommend including this message in your calendar invites so people have a chance to think about it ahead of time. Feel free to link to this help center article as well.

What are the laws around consent?

The laws pertaining to recording other people depend on where the people being recorded live.

While the laws differ from state to state, we believe privacy is so important that we recommend users of our product hold themselves accountable to a much higher standard than the bare legal minimum. We believe all users of our product should proactively seek consent from everyone they record even if they are not legally obligated to do so. Not only is this is the safest approach legally, but it is also just the right thing to do.

Patrick Collison described this exact product in a tweet once

Yes! Here's the tweet you are referring to: https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/953011978217205760

And his more recent reaction to our product: https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1587450179069743104

Amazing work. There's a mic drop moment in the demo when you're able to click on the link shared in the zoom, totally sold me.

Thank you! Flattered. :)

If you could bump me on the invite list

Absolutely! I'll move you up the wait list.

Totally understand how it might feel that way initially. Rewind is built privacy first. Unlike other cloud-based products, all of the recording data is stored locally on your Mac. It's not accessible to others (or to us as employees).

Not only that, but we have the following features focused on privacy:

1. Full control: users can pause and delete recordings at any time

2. Exclude apps: users can exclude specific apps they don’t want recorded (e.g. Signal or 1Password)

3. Incognito: by default, we don't record Chrome Incognito or Safari private browsing windows

We have a long roadmap of things we have planned to further our commitment to privacy. Anything in particular you'd love to see us implement that might make you feel more comfortable?

I'm Dan, co-founder & CEO of Rewind.

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.

Rewind is the search engine for your life. Check it out: https://www.rewind.ai

It’s a macOS app that enables you to find anything you’ve seen, said, or heard.

We’re also announcing that we’ve raised $10m at a $75m valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz.

In case you are curious, the inspiration for Rewind came from an unlikely place:

Our founding story

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.

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?

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.

Introducing Rewind

Here’s how it works:

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: <https://help.rewind.ai/en/collections/3616305-privacy>

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.

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 & 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 & paste anything from your past.

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: <https://help.rewind.ai/en/articles/6526620-recording-meeting>

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.

Rewind is just the first step toward our vision of giving humans perfect memory.

Please share any and all feedback you might have! We’re all ears

I'm assuming there is some sort of encryption, but if the software can transparently decrypt the data to access it, then what is to prevent someone stealing the key from the software?

You are right that if someone compromises your physical computer and knows your local Mac user account password then encryption won't help.

How is this affected by wiretap and privacy laws, where you would need the consent of other people in the room?

While the laws differ from state to state, we believe privacy is so important that we recommend users of our product hold themselves accountable to a much higher standard than the bare legal minimum. We believe all users of our product should proactively seek consent from everyone they record even if they are not legally obligated to do so. Not only is this is the safest approach legally, but it is also just the right thing to do.

At home, I certainly don't want something recording every sound.

We don't record every sound. We prompt you to record audio each time a new Zoom meeting starts. You can choose to record or not to record. You can also pause at any time and delete anything retroactively.

I'm Dan, co-founder & CEO of Rewind.

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.

Rewind is the search engine for your life. Check it out: https://www.rewind.ai

It’s a macOS app that enables you to find anything you’ve seen, said, or heard.

We’re also announcing that we’ve raised $10m at a $75m valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz.

In case you are curious, the inspiration for Rewind came from an unlikely place:

Our founding story

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.

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?

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.

Introducing Rewind

Here’s how it works:

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: <https://help.rewind.ai/en/collections/3616305-privacy>

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.

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 & 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 & paste anything from your past.

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: <https://help.rewind.ai/en/articles/6526620-recording-meeting...>

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.

Rewind is just the first step toward our vision of giving humans perfect memory.

Please share any and all feedback you might have! We’re all ears

A great alternative to Google Slides