Digital Surface

Digital Surface is a Mac application that captures what you do on your computer and makes it searchable later. It records screen activity via OCR, transcribes meetings without needing a bot in the call, and accepts voice dictation by holding a key and speaking. All this data flows into a local archive you can query through a chat interface, with citations pointing back to exactly where each answer came from.

The capture layer runs three parallel streams. Screen History takes periodic screenshots, runs optical character recognition on them, then discards the images and keeps only the extracted text with timestamps. Meetings tap into your audio and transcribe conversations as they happen, storing the output as searchable markdown and JSON files. Dictation lets you hold the Globe key and speak, with speech-to-text processing handled locally on your Mac rather than in the cloud. The result is a searchable record of your work without uploading raw data to external servers.

On the retrieval side, a chat interface lets you ask questions about what you've captured. Answers come back with cited sources, so you can see the exact screen grab or meeting moment the information came from. For developers and power users, there's an MCP server that connects your own Claude or Codex agents to the captured files. Your AI tools can read the same history you can, enabling automations that reference past context without you having to manually copy and paste.

Security gets explicit attention. Speech-to-text and OCR run on-device. Files are encrypted with AES-256-GCM per user. The system automatically redacts secrets and API keys from captures, and it skips password managers entirely. None of this data leaves your machine unless you explicitly connect an external agent, and even then the agent reads local files rather than hitting a remote API.

Pricing is subscription-based with two tiers. Starter costs twenty dollars a month and includes five dollars of model usage for roughly thirty to one hundred chats, plus ten gigabytes of storage. Pro costs two hundred dollars a month, includes fifty dollars of model usage for up to a thousand chats, and bumps storage to one terabyte. Unused model credits are refundable on request, and pay-as-you-go refills are available at cost plus ten percent. Both tiers include unlimited pages, history, and connected sources.

Digital Surface targets engineers, product designers, and scrum masters who want total recall of their workday without the privacy trade-offs of cloud-first capture tools. It sits in a niche between clipboard managers, meeting transcription services, and AI assistants, bundling all three into one local-first system.