9 ms·
Rewind Pendant: a wearable that captures what you say and hear
- surprisetalk 3y agoPrivacy issues aside, it's really cool to see a new category of device! I've been actively searching for something that will allow me to "write" my essays while I'm driving. I've tried voice memo apps for iOS, and the transcription stinks for everything I've tried. Rewind's transcriptions for meetings works great, so I'm cautiously optimistic --- Sidenote: I've been loving Rewind as a company, but I'm a bit worried about how they're approaching security. They store fantastic metadata[1] in their sqlitedb locally, but they recently started encrypting the DB, which is great, BUT I want to be able to poke around and see EXACTLY what's being recorded. [1] https://kevinchen.co/blog/rewind-ai-app-teardown/ https://kevinchen.co/blog/rewind-ai-app-teardown/ I've been trying to get a script like the following working, if anybody has pointers! sqlite3 -readonly -bail -hexkey $(security find-generic-password -w -a '' -s ai.rewind.data-account) \ ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.memoryvault.MemoryVault/db-enc.sqlite3 -cmd .tables
- solardev 3y agoHave you tried using some other speech recognition software to do the transcription afterward? In my experience Otter.ai and YouTube (uploaded as a private video) both work great for this. I think OpenAI also has Whisper (https://openai.com/research/whisper https://openai.com/research/whisper), but I've never used it.
- surprisetalk 3y agoWhisper works great, but there was a bit too much friction going from voice memo -> transcription -> notes.
- jliao18 3y agoI believe Rewind used all MacOS/iOS system API to do OCR (you can try it in shortcut) and Speech-to-Text. For example - OCR - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/vision/recognizing_text_in_images https://developer.apple.com/documentation/vision/recognizing...
- internetter 3y agoit uses (or, at least, used) Whisper
- Aardwolf 3y ago> We offer features for you to ensure no one is recorded without their consent. It says this 3 times without elaborating. How does this work?
- jbaczuk 3y agoA t-shirt with "I am recording you" in big letters
- dylan604 3y agoI want one that has a print of the "On Air" signs seen in studios. I honestly think that something like that needs to happen to things like the Meta RayBan glasses that do live streaming. Instead of the eyeballs that Apple's device is using, it should have a "Recording In Progress" or "On Air" across the lenses. Just because I'm in public and prone to be captured in someone's image capture doesn't mean that I have to be part of their money making venture.
- spicybright 3y agoIR blasting clothing is still legal to wear!
- dylan604 3y agoi've been looking at the idea of ball cap with surface mount LEDs under the bill of the cap, but i'm not much of a cap wearer any more. i then thought if they can fit cameras into sunglasses, why not do the Orbital thing with bright LEDs attached to my sunnies? then, the evil grin comes out and starts thinking more sinister with lasers to not just ruin the shot, but the sensor itself. then i realize, i've got work to do, and forget the whole thing
- jjoonathan 3y agoLike the anti-paparazzi clothes that regularly pop up in crystal clear photos?
- 01100011 3y agoBeen thinking of something like this for a while, but with video as well. It would be cool to have a searchable transcription of things in my immediate surroundings. Might make it impossible to lose my keys...
- swah 3y agoBut for the keys there is Airtags or fingerprint locks...
- wsintra2022 3y agoI think there was an early black mirror episode about a device along these lines, season 1 I think
- drybjed 3y ago"The Entire History of You" [1] [1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/
- cnewey 3y agoPrivacy issues aside for a moment, this looks really good and is something I’d be interested in. I can imagine this being helpful for folks with ADHD or memory issues. I have found meeting transcription tools to be absolutely invaluable at work so to expand that to my wider life makes good sense. That said I have to admit the monthly subscription price ($19-$29/mo) seems a little higher than I’d like for a wearable device, especially as the premium features appear functionally like a thin wrapper around an LLM and some search tools.
- micimize 3y agoThat pricing is for their other existing product/app that records and exposes digital activity locally in what looks like a fairly nice UI: https://www.rewind.ai/use-case/engineering https://www.rewind.ai/use-case/engineering Very interesting company IMO although I haven't given it a shot.
- rbanffy 3y agoIndeed. I’d love that with glasses as well - having perfect photographic memory of everything I see or hear, augmented by an AI that can correlate events, would be a real superpower. OTOH, I also watched enough Black Mirror to imagine the societal consequences of that. And yes, the subscription model indicates they’ll know a lot more about you than the ad copy discloses. If someone does one that’s fully local with absolutely no strings attached, I’d seriously consider it.
- Nereuxofficial 3y agoOn the other hand there is the Black Mirror: Entire History of you scenario
- nablacito 3y ago> We offer features for you to ensure no one is recorded without their consent. I wish the went deeper there.
- frereubu 3y agoThis looks like a privacy nightmare, even for the wearer - aren't going going to have to continuously ask for permission for every single person that you're in recording distance of when not in a public space?
- Etheryte 3y agoThat depends on where you live. In some European countries for example it's perfectly legal to record for personal purposes without announcing it. Bear in mind the phrase "for personal purposes" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, for example it's common that you can't use the recording in court if you haven't announced you're recording and since that would no longer be personal use.
- btilly 3y agoI'm curious how this works out in the privacy of people's homes. A lot of couples wind up arguing about who really said what. I wonder how it works out for them when someone produces the recording that settles it for good. While we would hope that it settles the argument, it doesn't address the emotions. And therefore I suspect that it would just make people's arguments worse.
- solardev 3y agoYeah, throwing a recording in their face seems like a surefire way to escalate that argument rather than resolving it. It's more about trust and mutual respect & compromise and forgiveness... if you start keeping score and playing gotchas, that only builds resentment.
- CharlesW 3y ago> I'm curious how this works out in the privacy of people's homes. It's a Black Mirror episode, if you want a preview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You
- eterm 3y agoWhat could possibly go wrong? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You )
- kevrmoore 3y agoWritten by Jesse Armstrong!
- jack_riminton 3y agoBlack mirror references aside, how useful would this actually be? If you’re using it to solve arguments with your spouse or at work then maybe more technology is not going to be a panacea for you
- fbdab103 3y agoI could imagine a few professional uses which are less creepy. Students/teachers, comedians, legal/medical dictation. I think the real power would be if it is wired up to an appropriately accurate text to speech engine and dumped to a searchable database. I have been blown away by how good Whisper is, but that requires too much technical expertise for the population. Having that workflow in a packaged product would be worth something not otherwise met by existing recorders.
- mplewis 3y agoThis is a "destroy on sight" item. I don't want you covertly recording me at any time.
- romwell 3y agoThe ship for covert audio recording has sailed many decades ago, around the time Dictaphone trade mark being registered by Alexander Graham Bell.
- JohnFen 3y agoI don't understand these sorts of responses. There's a world of difference between a device that could be abused to spy on people and a device that is designed and intended to do so. Also, just because there are existing ways to do the Bad Thing doesn't mean we should accept new ways of doing the Bad Thing. Particularly when the existing ways have enough friction that they require someone to intentionally decide to spy, rather than accidentally doing so.
- Etheryte 3y agoI mean, everyone already has a recording device in their pocket at all times that's more than capable of recording what you say if you filter the noise out. This device is just a microphone that's in a less noisy position along with a subscription.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoI think a person could reasonably distinguish between "this could record you" and "this, by design, is always recording".
- RobotToaster 3y agoIt says everything is stored locally with no cloud required, then requires a subscription. If it was just a one off purchase to own device I would love it, but I've had enough of everything being a rent seeking subscription.
- crooked-v 3y agoI tried their Mac app for a while, but the storage space required quickly became impractical for a retention period set to any actually-useful amount of time. I wonder how they've handled that here.
- bobbylarrybobby 3y agoIf all they need is voice, they could just transcribe it. That'd probably be a few KB per day.
- internetter 3y agoI've been thinking about doing something like this myself. Lyra[0], a codec by google, supports speech @3.2kbps (0.0004 MB/s), so 3.26060*24/1024/8, or 33.75MB/day. Filtering out periods of inactivity, it's likely under 10MB a day. I feel like my math must be wrong, because this feels crazy!! [0]: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/09/lyra-v2-a-better-faster-and-more-versatile-speech-codec.html https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/09/lyra-v2-a-better-f...
- romwell 3y ago>Rewind Pendant is a wearable that captures what you say and hear in the real world and then transcribes, encrypts, and stores it entirely locally on your phone So, the recordings are not stored locally (i.e. on-device), and it requires a phone to function.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xnx 3y agoOne example of prior art from 2012, a lifelogging camera pendant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_Clip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_Clip A blackbox recorder for our lives seems like a good thing overall.
- crooked-v 3y agoI had one of those, though I used it as a way to automatically get a smattering of photos while doing tourist stuff or going to concerts, rather than lifelogging. It was also pretty great for no-effort time lapses. I'm still disappointed there isn't any decent successor that can meet the same basic functionality, especially battery life.
- rapjr9 3y agoNot sure if they are still being manufactured but there are still new Ion Snap wearable cameras on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2334524.m570.l1313&_nkw=ion+snap+camera&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=0&_odkw=wearable+camera&_osacat=0 https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2334524.m... Probably lower quality than the Narrative Clip but I think somewhat smaller and lighter weight. Don't remember if it captures audio. It normally requires tapping on it to make it record a video clip or photo, but it can record time lapses as well. The Windows software for it is very clunky.
- hung 3y ago> We offer features for you to ensure no one is recorded without their consent. Source: trust me bro
- babelfish 3y agoPre-order form is broken: "The link is no longer active."
- rogeliodh 3y agoFor privacy aware people, you can diy with something like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33608437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33608437
- fu7kt 3y agoTime to start building an AI pendant that is active attacks against surveillance that broadcast distortion and garbling above and below the human voice level to harmonically distort recordings in a known space without disrupting human communication. You can overdrive tiny speakers or disrupt known NLP algos, both, whatever. Or maybe every house needs a Cone of Silence like in Get Smart.
- v4dok 3y agoThat would be awesome.
- fu7kt 3y agoI've been working on things that basically do that for a decade. I mean I didn't really think of this specific application initially but I did kind of.... rotating parabolic ultrasonic arrays something something. I'm looking for partners and investors! I recently threw up a hackaday for my development cyberdeck and am sifting through all the stuff from over the years to finally get this to market. With the new CloudFlare AI workers, a whole bunch of the infra I used to have to maintain is a moot point so I'm looking to really hit it hard in Q1 2024. https://hackaday.io/project/192933-synesthetic-homunculus https://hackaday.io/project/192933-synesthetic-homunculus
- PeterStuer 3y ago"A portable cyberdeck for creating holographic audio reactive composite composition" Might want to finetune that pitch. What is this thing and why would I want it?
- fu7kt 3y agoYeah. I'm working on that. This isn't really a pitch and you probably wouldn't want my cyberdeck. It's my dev workstation and yeah, no one wants that. I mostly mentioned it just because I'm getting to a phase where I am interested to get eyes on the weirder parts. Honestly, the concept itself is kind of a filter. If you look at it and get why you would want it, then we should probably talk, you're likely doing some weird stuff yourself! The real pitch is working towards seamless natural user interface for streaming composite spatial data. The easiest thing to explain that people will get is architectural pre-visualization. You've got plans and lot lines, input plans, it generates a structure, that's a known solution, easy peasy. That is layered over GIS data from whatever source. Construction is underway, I can do drone surveying and flightpath automation to do photogrammatry or NeRF or whatever to build and overlay the model from the scan. Simulations are easy for erosion, or looking at the light at different times of year. I can drop ship you a 3D printed architectural model or some sort of widget. If you point your phone at that widget, you can interact directly with the information. Standard AR fare, you can go onsite and see the AR stuff. Builders can take scans of things in production and combine them. Yadda yadda. I have a company that is selling basically that. But to get to there, what I'm after is real time streaming composites with effortless and inexpensive mcguffens. Composing things for a real time stream to be delivered for people to look at needs to have sort of LOD fallback. Streaming compressed point clouds that can be altered in real time, cameras that can be controlled or tabbed through, pulling video from multiple sources and muxing all of that into a cohesive digital product attached to a physical / inexpensive medium that a person can interact with. To build these things I've also had a focus on audio reactivity. Composition based on the sounds produced in the real world and in the digital world. Say 20 people have the same mcguffin, they can all fiddle with parts in place on their desktop as an AR or VR experience, or they can just open up a browser and mess with the world like a traditional video game. Or there can be a stream of 4k to Youtube or Twitch or whatever and that can be synced up to augment. This is a long term study on what I don't like about modern computing and what I want to see. The stuff that makes money is high throughput distributed GPU compute and GIS mapping. These days people also want LLMs in everything so I've got the stack to produce that and it pays the bills. The parts are really starting to fall into place though and I expect I'll have my "killer demo" by the end of the year. The problem is with this really is that I can't point to something and say "it's like that" because it doesn't exist and no one else is trying to do anything similar as far as I can tell. Anyway, thanks for looking!
- satvikpendem 3y agoThere's a short short by Ted Chiang about this concept (he also wrote Stories of Your Life which the movie Arrival is based off of). In the story, a father records his family's entire life but he realizes that he was just living vicariously through the camera instead of truly being present in the moment.
- spicybright 3y agoAnother related work is S1E3 of black mirror, The Entire History of You. An eye implant that records all audio and video becomes becomes the norm for people, almost like how ubiquitous cell phones are. The episode explores the social repercussions it can cause. Probably my favorite episode of the whole series.
- richie_adler 3y agoStarring Jodie Whittaker as the wife.
- satvikpendem 3y agoNow imagine how it'd be if ads were injected straight into your vision: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs https://youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
- blacksmith_tb 3y agoAh, yes, that's "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling"[1] one of his best (though I also like "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" quite a bit too). 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_of_Feeling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...
- thiago_fm 3y agoI hope this is just prohibited in the EU :-) If I see someone recording me(whether they did or not), I'll use my legal insurance to sue them into oblivion. There's an imaginary boundary of when technology starts to hurt humanity, and this clearly crosses it in so many ways. I can't believe the people behind this haven't thought about the negative sides, even if they deliver what they said in terms of privacy, it's so wrong in so many levels. Did they use ChatGPT to generate that silly idea? This is when you know AI hype has hit cryptocurrency level, where stupid ideas start popping all the time and supposedly raising money. It's time to grab popcorn and see VCs fund those stupid ideas and see them wasting their money.
- upon_drumhead 3y agoDo you sue everyone that has a phone? Where's the line? Is it the form factor?
- thiago_fm 3y agoIf they take a picture of me and I know it, yes. You can't see my house on Google Maps. I live in a civilized country with some privacy laws, which will likely just pump out more laws once silly products like this start popping in the market.
- upon_drumhead 3y agoDo you just not go out into public? What about stores with security cameras? What about tourists taking pictures with you in the background?
- thiago_fm 3y agoI do live and enjoy a normal life, but if I feel threatened by some silly device I won't just stare and accept that it's how things are. The same goes for pictures. Here it is for you how it works in Germany: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/photography-laws-germany https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/photography-laws-germany
- threeseed 3y agoSo one of the interesting parts from Zuckerberg's interview was that they are expecting to add a local multi-modal ML model capable of image classification, speech to text etc to the Rayban glasses as soon as next year. And with Humane having a similar device to this and Ive likely building one with OpenAI it looks this is going to be a heavily contested field. I do wonder if these products are reading the room though. Because there is a demand at the moment for more privacy not less.
- swsdsailor 3y agoThere was an early kickstarter for a watch that did something similar and I backed it, thinking it was brilliant. One of the first times I wore it was to a meeting, someone asked about it and when I explained how it worked he refused to continue the meeting until the watch was in the other room, turned off.
- throwaway29303 3y agoIt seems only a few learned a thing with Google Glass[0]. These devices are way ahead of our time. We're currently in a time and space where implementing these ideas only serve to tighten the elite's control over people. Stop producing these things. Thank you. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass#Criticism
- qup 3y agoNot if only the elites use 'em!
- TeMPOraL 3y agoYes, but ironically. More specifically, devices like this are cool when not widely known or adopted. As for "elite control", "elite" ain't controlling shit here - they're just peddling things to general population and raking it in. Outside of misplaced paranoia about government (misplaced in that spooks don't wait for surveillance equipment to be available off-the-shelf), people aren't worried about elites, they're worried about each other - randos on the streets being creeped out by other randos on the street. Society doesn't have the levels of kindness and trust to tolerate these kinds of technologies. Which is a shame, given the positives. (Of course those technologies being developed by advertising companies isn't a good thing, but notice how hardly anyone talks about that. People are too creeped out by each other, and not enough by advertisers.)
- sparrish 3y agoSo, iphone/Mac only?
- npunt 3y agoI love all this new exploratory hardware coming out. At $59 this seems like an easy way to try out the concept without committing, and the form factor doesn't seem fiddly. I wonder if there's ways to get the benefits of this while avoiding privacy issues. The best way I can think of preserve others privacy in an unobtrusive way would be to detect & remove other people's voices from any recordings (private by default). The only way to override this would be if others say "its ok to record" or equivalent phrase. That way you get meeting notes (where people consent) but not conversations in confidence (where people don't). For the in-between cases that users wanted to remember, they could repeat back what others say (e.g. other: 'that is $59' user: 'ok $59'). If this were accurate enough it seems like it'd address most of the privacy concerns, and is a pattern that can be used by all types of recording devices we'll be seeing in the coming years (and may be a good basis for legal regulation of this class of device). Zooming out, we're early in the cycle of this kind of tech, where forgetting is seen as a problem. There's a chance we over-shoot and remember too much, which is going to introduce its own problems because tech doesn't have a sense for what things are important psychologically for us to move on from and not have access to. Much like in other domains where tech gives us too much of what we want, I worry the response will be a dismissive "just don't look at it" personal responsibility argument. But that's further down the road from where we are.
- JohnFen 3y ago> I wonder if there's ways to get the benefits of this while avoiding privacy issues. There is. Get informed consent from the people before you record them. > The best way I can think of preserve others privacy in an unobtrusive way would be to detect & remove other people's voices from any recordings (private by default). I would consider this very insufficient because I've already been recorded at that point. But it would certainly be better than nothing. Better, in my view, is to get informed consent first. That gives people a real option to protect their privacy rather than relying on your (or the product's) good graces to be well-behaved.
- space_boy 3y agoDoes the LLM also reside on the local machine? I presume there would need to be something to manage the transcription and address queries related to that transcription. It seems like the LLM would require a reasonably extensive context window to be functional. Wouldn’t this necessitate a relatively powerful computer? I am definitely not an expert on this so I could be completely off target on one of these assumptions.. genuinely curious though.
- otoburb 3y agoThis is going to get some teacher unions in one-party consent states[1] up in arms as students start bringing similar types of (small) recording devices into the classroom.
- internetter 3y agoWhat's the battery life of this?
- fbdab103 3y agoPlus the amount of onboard storage. Can it only hold 30 minutes high quality, but 48 hours at AM radio level? Can it automatically trim dead air?
- JohnFen 3y agoBetween this and things like the Meta Ray-Bans, companies really seem to be very focused on essentially weaponizing actual human interactions.
- singularity2001 3y agoI just Avi Schiffmann's presentation of a similar concept called Tap. Very promising!
- starkparker 3y agoIt's incredible how every single endorsement on the homepage just reinforces the bad vibes on this thing. Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Alexis Ohanian, David Lieb. Genuinely expected to see an unironic Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, or John Riccitiello endorsement.
- sprsimplestuff 3y ago60% sure this is an mostly just an idea on their end and this `launch` is a test to see if the idea is worth pursuing for them
- rapjr9 3y agoI wonder how it handles noisy environments, low volume when talking, and TV or music playing in the background. I've tried using pocket recorders while driving and the result can be unintelligible. Would be more useful if it could do a rough interpretation of activities (based on sound or accelerometer) to make it easier to place transcriptions in context. Something like <music playing: 45 minutes> <walking: 3 minutes> <door opening: 1 minute> <transcription of conversation: 10 minutes> Reminds me of Deborah Estrin's work on Participatory Sensing: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=3_WYcR4AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=3_WYcR4AAAAJ... I remember a conference meeting where her team wore cellphones around their necks, set to automatically capture images every few seconds and didn't reveal it until they presented a paper about it, including just-captured images of all of us! Everyone was a bit surprised, some people got upset and I think she promised to delete all the images. She's done some work on recording diet with this kind of periodic camera capture also. Audio detection of eating is possible too. A life diary would be something many people find useful, especially those with memory issues (which is just about everyone to some extent). The privacy implications are severe though.
- qup 3y ago> Insights into your life: What are you doing when your voice sounds the most excited? If they're doing this without violating my privacy I'll [do something humiliating!]
- PeterStuer 3y agoYou need this product to extend your Twitter inquisitor zeal to the offline environment. /s No joke, I remember at uni muslim girls who were obliged by their family to have their phone on permanently when not in a strict controlled group. The latter love these things.
- Jemm 3y agoA bit surprised Apple let this app in their ecosystem.
- alohaaki 3y ago[dead]
- alohaaki 3y ago[dead]
- bfpill 3y agoLol. Wrote some code that basically does this a couple months ago. Whisper -> openai -> notion recording and classifying conversations. Never got it running on anything other than my laptop. I'd imagine anyone serious about this kind of thing would want to run everything locally. Plus this will be the simplest thing for any legit Ai company to crush in the future. https://github.com/bfpill/Gekko https://github.com/bfpill/Gekko