Everything on Channel Previously…
What the DVR records, how you scrub it back, and the one thing it won't do — make up the parts it didn't see. Here's the full line-up.
It records the whole channel — without melting your Mac.
The hard part of a screen-memory tool isn't capturing, it's capturing well: enough to be useful, light enough that you forget it's on. Previously captures on events, not a dumb fixed timer.
Continuous capture on-device
Screen and audio, captured as things actually change on screen — then deduped so it never stores the same frame twice. A resource governor throttles when your Mac is busy, so capture gets out of the way of your real work.
- Event-driven & dedup-gated — not fixed-interval polling
- HEVC-compressed, encrypted at rest
- Microphone and system audio
On-screen text, read & indexed on-device
Every frame is OCR'd with Apple's Vision framework so the words you saw become searchable — no cloud round-trip, nothing leaves the Mac.
Scene & activity tags on-device
Idle-time classification labels what you were doing — coding, a call, reading — building a timeline you can skim instead of scrubbing frame by frame.
Scrub to anything you've seen or said.
Type what you remember — exact words or a vague description. Both kinds of search run locally; results land you on the actual frame with the matched words lit up.
Keyword + meaning search on-device
Full-text keyword search (SQLite FTS5) for exact phrases, plus semantic search that understands what you meant — powered by Apple's on-device embeddings, so even "meaning" search needs no key and no cloud.
- "that email about the budget" finds it by meaning
- Matched term glows on the real screenshot frame
- Spoken words search exactly like on-screen text
People, places & a knowledge graph on-device
Names, organisations and links are extracted with Apple's NaturalLanguage tools and woven into a graph, so you can drill from a person to every moment they show up in.
Meetings, transcribed and split by speaker.
Built for the "wait — what did we actually decide?" call. Transcription and speaker separation both run on your Mac.
Local transcription on-device
Whisper, running locally via WhisperKit on the Apple Neural Engine. The model downloads once on first use, then transcribes fully offline forever after.
Who-said-what on-device
On-device speaker diarization splits a conversation by voice — name a voice once and Previously keeps attributing it. Meetings are detected automatically from the transcript.
Daily & weekly recaps — written by the AI you control.
The synthesis layer is the only part that uses AI, and it runs on your own Fireworks key — your account, your calls, nothing routed through us. Everything above stays free and local without it.
Daily & weekly wrap-ups your Fireworks key
The day's meetings, scenes and on-screen content reduced to a short, cited summary; the week consolidates the seven dailies. Every claim is fact-checked against the source before it's saved — no confident invented "you decided X."
- Cites its sources, flags what wasn't captured
- Verify-before-persist drops claims the footage doesn't support
Ask the archive your Fireworks key
Ask a question across your whole history and get a grounded, cited answer. No key? It still works — it falls back to a local extractive answer and tells you plainly that it answered locally, rather than bluffing.
Meeting titles & summaries your Fireworks key
Auto-written titles and structured notes — attendees, decisions, action items. Without a key the meeting still records and diarizes; you just name it yourself.
A real "previously on…" only shows what happened.
So does this one. Summaries cite their source and fact-check themselves; Ask cites its frames; and when a stretch wasn't captured, it says so instead of papering over the gap with a plausible guess.
Your show stays on your device.
The footage never airs anywhere else — and the only thing the AI layer ever sends is already-summarised, redaction-checked text, on your own key.
Encrypted at rest on-device
Screens, audio and transcripts are encrypted on your Mac — AES-256 for the media files, an encrypted database for everything else, all behind a single key held in your Keychain.
Cut away from the sensitive stuff on-device
Decided at capture time, before anything touches disk: password managers are skipped, and a focused password or secure field in any app is never captured. An exclusion shows up as an explained gap, not an unexplained void.
You can see it working on-device
A live readout of what's queued and processing, right in the menu bar. No black box wondering whether the audio quietly died — you watch the recap being made.
Free on the box vs. your own key.
One clean line: the whole memory engine is free and local. AI synthesis is the only thing that needs a Fireworks key — and that's your account, billed by Fireworks, never us.
No key, no problem: capture, search and recall all run without one. Ask just answers locally instead, and recaps wait until you add a key.
Press REC. Forget about it.
Download Previously, watch a week of your own footage, and decide if you want the series. Not open source — if that's the hill, no hard feelings.
Roll the recap — free