🧐 Cyte

🚧 Work in progress - this is beta software, use with care

A background screen recorder for easy history search. If you choose to supply an OpenAI key, or a local language model like LLaMA, it can act as a knowledge base. Be aware that transcriptions will be sent to OpenAI when you chat if you provide an OpenAI API key.

Uses

🧠 Train-of-thought recovery

Autosave isn’t always an option, in those cases you can easily recover your train of thought, a screenshot to use as a stencil, or extracted copy from memories recorded.

🌏 Search across applications

A lot of research involves collating information from multiple sources; internal tools like confluence, websites like wikipedia, pdf and doc files etc; When searching for something we don’t always remember the source (or it's at the tip of your tongue)

Features

• When no OpenAI key is supplied, and browser context awareness is disabled, Cyte is completely private, data is stored on disk only, no outside connections are made
• Pause/Restart recording easily
• Set applications that are not to be recorded (while taking keystrokes)
• Chat your data; ask questions about work you've done

Development/Contributing

• Generally, try to follow the surrounding style, but it's fine if you don't, linters can fix that stuff
• Fork this repository, make any changes, and when you're happy, submit a PR
• I prefer to keep documentation in the code (that's the most likely place it won't go too stale IMO)
• If you have a feature suggestion, please submit it through the website and I'll triage it and add it to the planned features below (which is also a rough roadmap)
• mainline is latest - if you want a 'stable' (as stable as pre-release can be) branch use a tag

Issues

• App sandbox is disabled to allow file tracking; instead should request document permissions
• Some results from searching fail to highlight the result snippet
• Keyboard navigation events: Return to open selected episode, escape to pop timeline view
• Apply object recognition per frame
• Test automation
• Unit tests for Memory
• Sync between Cytes
• Chat this episode
• Split episodes
• Incomplete features from the table below, or ports for Android or Linux

Feature parity/Roadmap

In general, features further down the table are planned for future releases, in priority order. To bump a feature, put in a request through the website.

Feature	macOS	iOS	Windows
Automatic recording	✅	❌1	✅
Full text search	✅	✅	✅
Rolling deletion	✅	✅	✅
Favorites	✅	✅	✅
Display source icons	✅	✅	✅
Date range filter	✅	✅	✅
Application filter	✅	✅	✅
Select save location	✅	✅	✅
Block selected applications	✅	✅	✅
OpenAI Chat	✅	✅	✅
Batch delete	✅	✅	✅
Single delete	✅	✅	✅
Timelapse	✅	✅	✅
HEVC compression	✅	✅	✅
LLaMa Chat	✅	✅	✅
Highlight search text in preview	✅	✅	❌
Recording status indicator	❌	❌	❌
URL tracking	✅	❌	❌
Block selected websites	✅	❌	❌
Semantic search	✅	✅	❌
Menu bar shortcuts	✅	✅	❌
Encryption	✅2	✅2	❌
File tracking	✅3	❌	❌
Display Recomposition	✅	❌	❌
Reporting	❌	❌	❌
Sync	❌	❌	❌
Export	❌	❌	❌
Object Recognition	❌	❌	❌

¹ There is currently no API on iOS that allows this (except when jailbroken)

² When using the encryption branch

³ When enabled via plist

Credits

Thanks to these great open source projects:

• DiffMatchPatch: Used to differentiate unchanged and changed text from OCR (macOS)
• SwiftDiff: Used to differentiate unchanged and changed text from OCR (iOS)
• AXSwift: Used for browser context awareness
• KeychainSwift: Used to securely store API keys in the Apple Keychain Manager
• SQLite.swift: Used for the text search functionality
• XCGLogger: Used to save debug logs to disk
• llama.cpp: Used to load and run LLMs for chat when a local model is provided
• MacPaw OpenAI: Used to run LLMs for chat when OpenAI API enabled (macOS/iOS)
• SimpleRecorder: Used as a seed for the windows version
• OpenAI-API-dotnet: Used to run LLMs for chat when OpenAI API enabled (windows)
• Diff.Match.Patch: Used to differentiate unchanged and changed text from OCR (windows)
• LLamaSharp: Used to load and run LLMs for chat when a local model is provided (windows)