About screenpipe

screenpipe is a source-available application that continuously captures your screen and audio, creating a searchable, AI-powered memory of everything you do on your computer. All data is stored locally on your device. It is the leading source-available alternative to Rewind.ai (now Limitless), Microsoft Recall, Granola, and Otter.ai. If you're looking for a rewind alternative, recall alternative, or a private local screen recorder with AI, screenpipe is the most popular option you can fully audit.

• Website: https://screenpi.pe
• Documentation: https://docs.screenpi.pe
• Discord: https://discord.gg/screenpipe
• License: Screenpipe Commercial License (source-available; personal, non-commercial use permitted, commercial use requires a license, see LICENSE.md)

Who screenpipe is for

• Knowledge workers who want to recall anything they've seen or heard on their computer
• Developers who want to give AI coding assistants (Cursor, Claude Code, Cline, Continue) context about what they're working on
• Researchers who need to search through large volumes of screen-based information
• People with ADHD who frequently lose track of tabs, documents, and conversations
• Remote workers who want automatic meeting transcription and notes
• Teams & enterprises who want to deploy AI across their organization with deterministic data permissions and central config management (screenpi.pe/team)
• Anyone who wants a private, local-first alternative to cloud-based AI memory tools

Platform support

Minimum requirements: 8 GB RAM recommended. ~5–10 GB disk space per month. CPU usage typically 5–10% on modern hardware thanks to event-driven capture.

Core features

Event-driven screen capture

Instead of recording every second, screenpipe listens for meaningful events — app switches, clicks, typing pauses, scrolling — and captures a screenshot only when something actually changes. Each capture pairs a screenshot with the accessibility tree (the structured text the OS already knows about: buttons, labels, text fields). If accessibility data isn't available (e.g. remote desktops, games), it falls back to OCR. This gives you maximum data quality with minimal CPU and storage — no more processing thousands of identical frames.

Audio transcription

Captures system audio (what you hear) and microphone input (what you say). Real-time speech-to-text using Whisper (Large-V3-Turbo) running locally on your device, or Deepgram for cloud transcription. Speaker identification and diarization. Works with any audio source — Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, or any other application.

On macOS 14.4+, you can exclude specific apps from system-audio capture by listing their bundle IDs in ~/.screenpipe/audio-exclusions.json. Enable Experimental CoreAudio System Audio in Settings → Recording first; the picker UI only appears once that flag is on.

{ "excluded_apps": [{ "bundle_id": "com.spotify.client", "name": "Spotify" }] }

The exclusion list hot-reloads — edits to the file and excluded apps launching/quitting are picked up on the engine's existing 500 ms tap-rebuild loop without restarting screenpipe. Override the file path with SCREENPIPE_AUDIO_EXCLUSIONS_PATH for testing. Note: this requires the "System Audio Recording Only" TCC permission in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen & System Audio Recording.

AI-powered search

Natural language search across accessibility-first screen text, OCR fallback text, and audio transcriptions. Filter by application name, window title, browser URL, date range. Full-text keyword search (SQLite FTS5) under the hood. Returns screenshots and audio clips alongside text results.

Timeline view

Visual timeline of your entire screen history. Scroll through your day like a DVR. Click any moment to see the full screenshot and extracted text. Play back audio from any time period.