One of my favourite Mac apps has just gotten a huge update with GPT-4. And
now it lets you turn your computer into your personal AI assistant who remembers
everything for you. It looks really good, so let's see what it can do.
The app I wanted to talk about is Rewind. If you're watched my previous videos, you may know it
already. In a nutshell, it's an app that records everything you do on your Mac, including what you
see, say and hear, and makes it all searchable. Because of that, you can sort of go back in time
to see what you were doing at a certain time. You can also search for specific words or phrases
that have appeared on the screen. You can even search for things people said in a Zoom meeting
because it automatically transcribes meetings. So evidently, the biggest benefit of this app is
that you don't have to worry about forgetting things like a website you saw or a message,
an email you got. You can find anything you need in a second and jump right back to it.
It's already very useful as it is, but now with the new update, it's even better. It's called Ask
Rewind which is powered by GPT-4. So previously, when you wanted to find something in Rewind,
you had to manually search for it by typing a specific keyword or phrase. Or simply rewind
until you find it which probably takes ages. But now, you can let AI do this work for you. You
just need to ask what you want, and then it will find it for you. So even if you don't remember
the title or keywords in what you're looking for, you can just describe it, and then it can
probably find it. But that's only the beginning. There are many more cool ways to use this feature.
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Back to Rewind. After using this for a few days, I realised that having Ask Rewind is like having
an assistant who has photographic memory. And it's so useful when you're doing a research with a lot
of documents, videos, and articles, and you want to process the huge amount of information quickly.
So let's say I want to learn about passkeys which is a new technology of logging into your
accounts. I could just browse the internet to find relevant articles like I usually
do a research. But instead of reading it all, I could use Ask Rewind to give me a summary of the
articles. Not just one article, but everything I saw about the topic which I guess is the big
difference between other AI summary apps and this one. And I can even ask questions about them or
have it explain it to me in plain words. Ultimately you could have it write a whole
blog post, article and stuff for you based on the readings.
For example, I actually used it a little bit when writing the script for this video. I just
had a quick look at the website of Rewind to train the AI, then ask it to write a brief
introduction of what Ask Rewind is, and how it can be used. The result was pretty
good. This is something ChatGPT cannot do, at least for now, because you cannot feed it new
information like this. But ChatGPT will soon have an access to the internet, so things will change
pretty soon. Or you could just use Bing which is essentially like ChatGPT with the internet access.
Anyway, I think this is going to be super useful for students. You can read a bunch of academic
articles and get a summary of them. Or if you forget where you read something, you can ask
it to find the reference. And also, you could ask it to create a quiz for you to prepare for exams.
Or you can ask it to create flashcards based on the materials you saw to memorise things.
Then you just have to write the flashcards in Anki, Remnote or whatever app you use.
Another use case I found useful is to ask about emails and messages I got. Sometimes I forget what
emails I received and who I need to reply to. In that case, instead of switching apps and tabs to
find the email or message I'm looking for, I could just ask about it to give me a summary of the
email thread or what people wanted from me. Then, I can just go to the email to reply if I need to.
And of course, you can even have it write an email for you. What's great is that it already
knows the context such as what you talked about with this person and how you met, so the quality
of what it crafts is very good. Summarising meetings
Also, if you have lots of meetings online, it could be a big help. You can have it summarise
a meeting, get you a list of action items and decisions and so on. So even if you space out
during a meeting which I honestly do, it is possible to use this app to see what you missed.
Review your day and week Finally, this is useful if
you want to review your day or week. You can see what you did in a day, how productive you were,
or how much you procrastinated. I guess it's cool to find out how you
slack off during a day and you can use that information to be more careful next time.
I've been using it for only a few days, but it's been very helpful. But as always,
it's not perfect. For example, you cannot see the conversation history. Once you're
done asking something and closing it, it's gone forever. You could just ask the same thing again,
but it's a bit tedious. Something like a save conversation option would be nice.
Also, another thing was that there's no copy option. After having it to write an email
or summary, it would be a lot easier if you just press a button to copy the whole thing,
instead doing it all manually. It's a small thing, but a big time-saver.
Then one of the cons of using Rewind is that it takes a huge chunk of your
computer storage. It says on average it uses 14GB per month. So if you want to keep
the recording for 1 year or more, it could easily take more than 100GB of the storage.
And finally and evidently, the biggest concern is privacy. After all, it records everything
you do on your computer. They do say the data will never leave your device and is
stored locally. But if you use Ask Rewind, your date has to be sent to OpenAI to process it,
so that's a bit of concern. Although they say your sensitive information like credit card
number and social security number won't ever leave your computer. And also they let you
customise which apps and websites are allowed to be recorded. So for example, I don't let it record
1Password which is my password manager. So there are things you can do about it if you're worried
about privacy. But it really depends on your preference and jobs too. If your work involves
handling sensitive information about your clients or customers, I would probably stay away from it.
Alright, if you want to know more awesome AI apps, check this video out!
Thank you so much for watching guys! I will see you in the next one. Bye.