GoKawiilThere has been a lot of talk around building context for AI systems. In consumer software, we have seen startups being built around search, documents, and meetings. All of them want to capture context from your digital life, provide connections to other tools, and let you query all that data. Some tools went further. For instance, Rewind (which became Limitless and sold to Meta) and Microsoft Recall aim to capture everything happening on your screen and help you remember it all.
A new startup called Littlebird is trying a similar thing with a slightly different approach. While apps like Rewind store screenshots or some kind of visual data, Littlebird is “reading” the screen and storing the context in text format.
The core idea behind the product is that since it is reading your screen all the time, you don’t need to provide additional context for productivity. The startup believes that while a lot of AI tools are trying to distract you, Littlebird can work in the background and can only appear when you want it to.
Image Credits: Littlebird Image Credits:Littlebird
When you set up Littlebird on your computer, you can customize which apps you want the app to ignore and not capture any context. The startup said that it automatically ignores password managers and sensitive fields in web forms like passwords and credit card details. You can opt to connect other apps like Gmail, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and Reminders with the app, as well.
The app lets you ask questions about your data, offering pre-generated prompts to get you started, such as “What have I been doing today?” or “What kind of emails are important to me?” In a couple of days of usage, I noticed that these prompts became more personalized as time went on.
Littlebird also has an in-built Granola-like notetaker that uses system audio and runs in the background to capture transcription from meetings and create notes and action items based on that. When you open up a meeting in the detailed view, there’s an option called “Prep for meeting” that takes the context of past meetings, emails, and company history into account to give you more details about the meeting. The feature also fetches information from sources like Reddit to inform you what users are thinking about a particular product or a company.
Image Credits: Littlebird
Another tool called Routines offers detailed prompts for Littlebird to run at a repeated interval, such as daily, weekly, or monthly. The company lists some ready-to-use routines like daily briefing, weekly activity summary, and yesterday’s work summary. Users can create their own routines as well with custom instructions.
Littlebird was founded by Alap Shah, Naman Shah, and Alexander Green in 2024. Brothers Alap and Naman founded Sentieo, a platform for institutional investors, which was sold to market intelligence firm AlphaSense. They previously also co-founded a healthy food company called Thistle. Alap was also a co-author of the viral Citrini paper on how AI agents could destroy the economy, which resulted in various tech stocks dipping. Green has built various companies in hardware, software, and AI.
... continue reading