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Atlas Recall Is a Photographic Memory of Your Entire Digital Life

“We know we've arrived in nirvana when the save button is obsolete.”
Image: Shutterstock

On Wednesday, Atlas Informatics released a free iOS beta version of Atlas Recall, a program that is being billed as the Google of digital memories.

Simply put, Recall captures all of an individual's activity across all of their devices to create a searchable visual index of their digital life. Can't remember the name of that awesome YouTube video you were watching a few weeks ago while you were supposed to be writing that term paper? Don't sweat it—Recall's got your back.

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Video: Atlas Informatics/YouTube

Founded in 2012, Atlas Informatics is the brainchild of Jordan Ritter, a co-founder of Napster and Silicon Valley angel investor. The company's flagship product, Atlas Recall, started with a complex problem and a simple solution.

"I have all these devices, apps, services, and operating systems and I'm dying from all this digital chaos," Ritter told Motherboard. "Why don't [my devices] just remember everything and index it? Why do I have to save or bookmark this stuff? So the frame for Atlas Recall was very simple: if you saw it, you can search it."

According to Ritter, computer engineers have been trying to solve this problem for decades, but until recently they had been limited by the state of technology: there simply wasn't enough bandwidth and processing power to feasibly make a searchable index that spanned multiple devices. As the technological barriers to a multi-platform, multi-device index fell, a computational architecture revolution called cloud computing began and laid the groundwork for Atlas Recall.

Image: Atlas Informatics

Prior to the rise of cloud computing, files and applications were stored locally on devices rather than on a distributed network of servers known as the cloud, which limited their accessibility. Moreover, the apps that were being developed a decade ago weren't being designed with the Information and Communication Technology accessibility standards in mind. These standards aim to make software accessible to those with any number of disabilities, which effectively means that anything you see in an app can be rendered as text.

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Atlas Recall uses this distributed file storage model and accessibility paradigm—common to almost every application used today—to create a searchable index of a user's digital life. Since accessibility standards are the same regardless of platform, device or application, it creates a common interface that can be read by Atlas to determine what is on your screen at any given time.

We can literally index anything you see, which is effectively how our memories work

"That was the thing that people hadn't really realized," said Ritter. "[They] thought of it as an accessibility support mechanism when in fact it's the API that everybody can see."

When a user downloads Atlas Recall, it constantly runs in the background of each device it is installed on. Anytime a user interacts with a digital item on the device, be it an app, webpage or word document, Atlas indexes the interaction, recording the time, type and length of engagement with the item.

"We can literally index anything you see, which is effectively how our memories work," said Ritter.

This may feel a little invasive, but Ritter was quick to point out that Atlas Recall can be "paused" at any time so that it stops collecting data about what a user is doing.

Read More: We Need to Make Digital Data That Dies Like Us

Furthermore, Atlas Informatics can't actually see the digital items you interacted with, just how you interacted with them, and users can always remove any indexed items from the repository. Eavesdroppers are also kept out of the loop because all of the data collected by Atlas is encrypted in motion as well as when it comes to rest in Amazon cloud.

The real success of Atlas Recall is found in its integration with Google and Spotlight searches. When you search for something in these apps, Atlas can also make recommendations based on your past activity. The goal for Ritter and his colleagues is to eventually implement a strong machine learning component so that Atlas can find things for you before you know you need them.

"The system gets to know you in a way like never before, it starts to be able to identify intents and can start recommending things in real time across all of your apps," said Ritter. "We know we've arrived in nirvana when the save button is obsolete and you just don't worry about it anymore. It has a very profound paradigmatic shift once this vision is fully realized."

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