ScreenMemory: Helping You Set Up Recall on macOS

As you may know, new Windows devices will feature a tool called Recall. It’s an AI-powered function that automatically records everything happening on your computer, allowing you to later ask Copilot to find specific information.

As you may know, new Windows devices will feature a tool called Recall. It’s an AI-powered function that automatically records everything happening on your computer, allowing you to later ask Copilot to find specific information.

So, how can you set up something similar on macOS?

While Recall doesn’t exist for macOS—and likely never will—you can use an app called ScreenMemory. It also records everything happening on your device and allows you to search through the data. However, unlike Recall, it doesn’t include AI capabilities.

First Impressions

There’s no onboarding tutorial when you first launch ScreenMemory. Instead, you’re greeted with a blank screen for viewing recordings—of which you naturally have none yet.

You can check that the app is working through the menu bar. Here, you’ll find the app’s status, an option to pause recording, take a screenshot, or return to the full interface.

Within just a minute, ScreenMemory starts collecting data, and you can begin browsing and searching. The app itself resembles a video player, with navigation by dates and the ability to scrub to specific moments.

A built-in calendar conveniently highlights the days for which data has been saved.

You can use the search bar to find text from captured data. Unlike Recall, which integrates AI for contextual searches, ScreenMemory relies solely on OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to extract text from screenshots.

This means you can only search for recognized text. For example, typing something like “blue shoes on Ozon” won’t yield results unless those exact words appear in the screenshots. Consequently, the usefulness of the search results may vary.