Interview with Dan Siroker: Rewind AI’s journey and vision
Dan Siroker, the CEO of Rewind AI, a personalized AI and second brain that encrypts and stores everything you do or say locally, making the data meaningful with AI, and allowing you to quickly review your past activities. Rewind is an AI assistant that seamlessly integrates into our personal lives, respects our privacy with a strong focus on its privacy policy. The company’s founding story was born out of a genuine need to enhance lives with AI support, and as CEO Dan Siroker puts it, “Our vision is to give humans superpowers.”
Rewind has garnered investment from prominent firms such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sam Altman from OpenAI, and its latest funding round valued the company at $350 million. The company also stands out with Dan Siroker’s Twitter posts about fostering an internal feedback culture.
Rewind AI records and comprehends everything you do on your computer, making it accessible as screen recordings. With Rewind, you can ask about actions you’ve taken or thoughts you’ve had. Additionally, if desired, it can record audio from your computer’s microphone, enabling you to capture spoken conversations in, for example, a physical meeting. This allows you to quickly access specific details later.
Furthermore, Rewind is launching the Rewind Pendant, which has received 3,000 pre-orders. By wearing this pendant, you can record everything around you, and GPT-4, in conjunction with Rewind, will make sense of it all. You can access Rewind from your smartphone, ensuring you’ll never forget things like your spouse’s grocery list request.
Before we move on to the interview, it’s worth noting that Rewind’s mobile application and Rewind Pendant offer an AI-assisted solution for people with ADHD, busy professionals, and individuals with hearing impairments, as well as anyone who wishes for a “magical box” that provides quick access to their computer activities, conversations, and surroundings.
The product continues to evolve at the pace of AI advancements and the innovative approach of the team. We look forward to receiving updates from the Rewind team. Exciting, isn’t it?
Interview with Dan Siroker,
First of all, can you tell us about the story of Rewind, what kind of need or dream did Rewind start with?
I started to go deaf in my 20s and when I turned 30 I tried a hearing aid for the first time. It changed my life. To lose a sense and gain it back again feels like gaining a superpower. Ever since that moment, I’ve been looking for ways that technology can give us superpowers.
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.
There are millions of computer users with ADHD today, how did Rewind become so popular for people with ADHD?
Our computers are powerful but can be extremely distracting. We’re constantly getting bombarded by notifications and new tasks each day which can be overwhelming. Sometimes all you need to do is rewind back one minute to jog your memory, and be reminded of what you were working on before that new email came in, and the simplicity of Rewind makes it easy to keep you on track.
Do you really think AI will be able to seriously support people against ADHD?
The average consumer forgets 90% of their memories after a week. Their memory peaks when they are 20 years old and gets worse every year thereafter. We’ve learned from our users with ADHD that Rewind uniquely solves a problem for managing their attention, focus, and memory. AI can be designed to help individuals with ADHD manage their routine and tasks more effectively and because Rewind compresses, transcribes, encrypts, and stores your data locally (so only you have access), you’re able to ask the AI anything and get a personalized response. So Rewind solves a painful problem for people with ADHD in a way that protects their privacy.
Rewind records what we do on the computer every day, and also records audio. Can you tell us more about how people use these features?
The most common use case we see for Rewind is automatically recording, transcribing, and summarizing meetings. We make it easy to capture what you want, and exclude apps that you don’t want captured. By default, we don’t record incognito or private windows. Unlike other tools out there, Rewind can do this without an annoying bot joining your meeting. Rewind also gives you the added advantage of being able to query with AI anything that was said in the meeting or even shown on the screen.
We also hear from our users that they use Rewind to automate note taking completely. Because you have instant access to everything you’ve seen, said, or heard on your computer there is essentially no reason to take notes because you can effortlessly recall whatever you need to.
And of course, Rewind has been tremendously helpful for folks who need to jump back in time a few minutes, whether it’s to remember what they promised someone or what they were just doing.
Rewind shows us what we are doing now, that is, it reminds us about the past, but is there a plan for the future? Will he say: “You can do these things today” or “I plan these things for you tomorrow”?
We’ve been thinking a lot about this and are exploring different ways of using AI to help you do more. We’re exploring ways to surface helpful info, at the right time, so stay tuned for updates.
Can you talk about Rewind’s technology?
We do compression and Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) all locally on your Mac. We compress raw recording data up to 3,750x times but the amount of data that changes frame-to-frame when recording your screen does not change as much as you would think. Since we only store the information related to the changes, and not all of the data, you can save a ton of space.
When you use Ask Rewind, only the text of the most relevant moments from your past are sent to GPT-4 to generate an answer. Using certain keywords from your question, we’ll show you the best possible answers for your query based on a search we do through the entire database.
Rewind Pendant is really exciting, with this product you directly connect AI and your own product with real life. Can you tell us a little about this, how did this idea come about, what is its current stage and can you tell us a little about your plans?
The first vision I had for this wearable device was 3 years ago, and as we think about what it means to be a personalized AI, it means there’s far more to life than what’s happening on your devices. There’s the real world. If you could capture that in a way that respected your privacy, then we could really deliver on this vision of perfect memory.
We’re in very early stages of development, so will share more details as we approach launching. One thing that’s certain: we’re keeping privacy at the forefront of all the decisions we make as we develop Pendant.
What kind of product management team is there behind you, how does the PM team work and what are the goals you can talk about?
We actually don’t have any product managers, but we do thrive off of customer feedback. We get plenty of it and constantly ask our users how we can improve. We have a very active Rewind Community and do a lot of testing before shipping new features.
This is a really interesting idea, I think you should try Rewind for different case studies, because this is a product that can be used in many areas. Do you have any work on different case studies?
We see that Rewind is helpful for people who are context switching a lot, and people who care a lot about productivity. You can see our case studies for executives, engineers, and sales too by going to our website and clicking Use Cases in the top left.
So, what are the investment plans for company growth?
We raised our Series A earlier this year, so don’t have plans anytime soon to fundraise. You can see our public investor presentation here.
Thank you very much to Dan Siroker for his responses and to Heidi Liou for her support throughout the process!
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