Rewind Pendant: a wearable that captures what you say and hear

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

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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/

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

It says this 3 times without elaborating. How does this work?

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.

I wish the went deeper there.

I think OpenAI also has Whisper (https://openai.com/research/whisper), but I've never used it.

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.

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

Given the “insights into your life” feature, maybe it will refuse to record “new” voices without an explicit check? The implication of the marketing copy is that it understands both the words and the sentiment so it wouldn’t be that absurd to think it can also distinguish one person from another. I assume in the end Rewind’s expectation boils down to “trust us” which is not good enough for me but probably good enough for them to make money for people who don’t care.

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.

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.

So, the recordings are not stored locally (i.e. on-device), and it requires a phone to function.

Very interesting company IMO although I haven't given it a shot.

A blackbox recorder for our lives seems like a good thing overall.

It's a Black Mirror episode, if you want a preview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You

Portable microcassette records have been around for many decades (and hitting record on a phone to capture audio is something anyone can do without taking the phone out of the pocket).

There's a reason you're wondering about how well this idea works.

Source: trust me bro

For example - OCR - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/vision/recognizing...

Or maybe every house needs a Cone of Silence like in Get Smart.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Stop producing these things. Thank you.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass#Criticism

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.

That would make no sense.

This device is very similar to what I've pursued for a short time.

Almost every country (with a notable exception of several US states) allow to record conversations for personal use. You just cannot distribute them to third-parties without consent.

I did not sit to see what the police would have done with the material once they came, but are we sure they would dismiss it immediately, provided it had indeed broke some law?

Just some food for thought

The same goes for pictures.

Here it is for you how it works in Germany: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/photography-laws-germany

My prediction is typical move fast break things tech bro culture. Release a product to everyone that is illegal in most states, wait for people to get hurt by it and care enough to complain, withdraw the product from the problem areas.

The fact they're so vague on who is recorded means they don't actually care, or at best don't have a solution yet to the problem.

[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...

I feel like my math must be wrong, because this feels crazy!!

[0]: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/09/lyra-v2-a-better-f...

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.

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

"Virtual Walls: Protecting Digital Privacy in Pervasive Environments"

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.

A long time ago I had an idea after leaving DEFCON about making a standard gizmo, something like a lapel pin that connects via whatever to whatever supercomputer someone is carying in their pocket and that thing presents an obvious color code. Lets say 4 quadrants with a circle in the middle. I think ideally it would be like epaper with maybe a backlight option. Non intrusive but could be vivid. This could let people know in polite society if they did not want to be recorded, were recording, how they were recording, etc. Obviously this doesn't stop anyone from doing whatever, but you can monitor signals from people and if someone is doing something they say they aren't that can be shared. You can also transmit information like PGP public keys via ultrasonic handshake or whatever.

I mean, day to day I could see never needing it but going into the office, taking the train, going to court, going to a concert, there are a lot of ways something like that could be very useful and if adopted at any sort of scale could error check and blacklist bad actors.

Reminds me of Deborah Estrin's work on Participatory Sensing:

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.

If they're doing this without violating my privacy I'll [do something humiliating!]

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.

Might want to finetune that pitch. What is this thing and why would I want it?

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.)

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.

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.

I try to get as much relationship decision making as possible done via SMS text or email.

And the moment there is a discussion/argument that turn to “what you said/what I said”, I say I’m only willing to talk about tangible facts, not conversation recollections.

The first Black Mirror episodes were really like looking at the future.

I really recommend to see this episode as it shows what consequences such devices can have on people's lives.

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.

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.

I am doubtful that that would work well in practice though.

> it is fundamental to the product experience

Without speaking too much to the underlying implementation, could you at least:

Clarify if "fundamental to the product experience" and "ensure no one is recorded without their consent" means the control loop is able to sense a non-consenting speaker and stop recording?

Clarify if "recorded without their consent" means never sending recordings off-device? Or does it just mean omitting the record from user facing long-term storage?

Clarify whether consent is opt-in or opt-out?

Clarify whether consent is actually consent, or the effective equivalent of supplying the user a "resume recording" button?

Clothing or accessories that shine IR are a completely different functionality and while they could be stopped by paparazzi buying better IR filters, that requires an additional cost on top of the camera

- However the way the law is written, it's vague enough that the 'posting or announcing' you need to give notice if recording others not in your conversation could be:

simply having 'we're recording' printed and posted on the door of a club would be legal, (nothing saying how large of print, or if it was surrounded by 100 other printed things)

and so would someone shouting 'hey we're recording' in a bar .

- that's the way the law was technically written, and though we know that yelling 'we're recording' would not be heard or even register to those who did hear the statement, that and what it would mean and most would miss the printed notice on door or forget it - it would technically be legal.

(no need to do both, either would satisfy law as written)

Not sure if the laws on this have been updated since then, and pretty sure it varies state by state.

I am not a lawyer, and am not referencing any case law here.

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!

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

I'll do some digging on the euro consortium, it wouldn't happen to be AliceVision would it? That's more a euro university group, but I could see them being related.

Do you sell it to Portugal?

Thanks in avance.

Hugo