Littlebird

Yesterday I saw a TechCrunch report about a startup called Littlebird. The headline sums it up as an AI-assisted ‘recall’ tool that reads your computer screen.

Products like Rewind¹ or ScreenMemory give me a better chance of recalling things I’ve seen but don’t remember exactly where I saw them. I actually just used ScreenMemory to find an X post I came across earlier. So I’m glad to see a new startup tackling this pain point, even if it is just one piece of a larger productivity problem space they’re targeting, like meeting notes or contextual insights in business workflows.

However, my excitement quickly faded after taking a closer look at how Littlebird works. My two main concerns are its text-only approach and the privacy implications.

From the news:

“We don’t store any visual information. We only store text, which makes the data a lot lighter-weight. I think that was probably another reason that Recall and Rewind struggled, which is that taking a screenshot is a lot more data hungry. I also think it’s more invasive,” he said.

In my experience, it’s not always about text. Sometimes what I want to recall is visual information, like UI elements or layout, which makes Littlebird’s text-only approach less effective.

And then there’s the privacy aspect. Littlebird stores all of your data on its servers. Yes, it’s encrypted, and you can delete it at any time. But I’d still prefer to keep this kind of data on my own machine from the start. Once everything is uploaded to the cloud, the real risk is that sensitive information may be exposed in the first place.² Deleting it later doesn’t necessarily eliminate the legal exposure.

I think a product like Littlebird offers real value and could become even more powerful with AI. But not every feature needs to rely on cloud-based AI. Sometimes I just want to set a time range, search for a keyword, and maybe filter by app, similar to how Rewind works.

It would be great if Littlebird offered a paid offline plan without cloud AI and made the app easy to plug in local LLMs.

That said, I might not be the target user here. Ultimately, Littlebird seems to be going after a different market, closer to tools like Granola, rather than the use cases I care about.