OpenRewind

OpenRewind is an open-source alternative to rewind.ai, forked from OpenRecall.

We wanted to create an open source app that provides similar core functionality to rewind.ai, and that app is OpenRewind.

To-dos

Update the OCR Engine

OpenRecall currently uses docTR as its OCR engine, but it performs inadequately. On my MacBook Air M2 (2022), processing a screenshot takes around 20 seconds, with CPU usage peaking at over 400%. During this time, screenshots cannot be captured, and the engine appears to recognize only Latin characters.

To address this, we plan to replace the OCR with a more efficient alternative that supports multiple writing systems. We are working on RapidOCR ONNX, a fork of a project which has same name, developed by RapidAI. RapidOCR ONNX uses PaddleOCR as its model architecture, and runs on the ONNX Runtime.

Implement a Task Queue/Scheduler

Currently, OpenRecall's OCR recognition and database operations are synchronous (blocking). This results in increased screenshot frequency, as described in the previous section.

Our next goal is to introduce a task queue to handle high-load tasks (such as OCR, indexing, and archiving) asynchronously. This will ensure that time-sensitive tasks (like capturing screenshots) are prioritized.

Improve the Frontend

The current frontend of OpenRecall is quite basic. Given my expertise in web development, I will build a more elegant frontend from scratch.

We are now switched to Electron in order to deliver a native experience, aiming to match the functionality of rewind.ai.

Add More Features

We will be implementing the feature list proposed in the OpenRecall repository. Stay tuned for updates.