Screen Pipe
Screen Pipe · Productivity
Screen Pipe is a local-first AI screen and audio recorder that captures your work history 24/7 so AI agents can search and act on it.
About Screen Pipe
What Is Screen Pipe
Screen Pipe records your screen and audio around the clock, then turns that raw activity into a searchable record your AI tools can actually use. Everything lands on your own machine in ~/.screenpipe/ by default, so you keep the data while models like Claude, Cursor, or Codex get the context they need.
It solves a specific annoyance: chat assistants forget. Ask Claude what you did in a meeting last Tuesday and you usually get a blank stare. Screen Pipe gives those tools a local AI memory of your screen, so questions about your own work stop coming back empty. It reads app text through accessibility APIs, falls back to OCR on the frames when that's not enough, and transcribes audio locally.
The catch is trust. A tool watching every window all day is a hard sell, and Screen Pipe knows it. You can exclude apps, windows, and URLs, and redact sensitive fields before anything syncs. Paid tiers move data off-device. The free plan is the one for strict local-only capture.
Getting Started
- Download the desktop app from the official site. It runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
- Open it and grant screen recording and microphone permissions when prompted. Screen Pipe starts capturing right away.
- Let it record for a few minutes while you browse, code, or check Slack to build up some history.
- Connect your AI assistant with the one-line setup command, which installs the skills and registers the MCP server.
- Install a scheduled task from the library, or ask it to draft your first daily recap.
Product Information
A quick look at Screen Pipe's pricing, supported platforms, and performance.
Best for
The users, tasks, and scenarios where this tool fits best.
Users
- Developers and engineers
- Founders and solo operators
- Remote teams on the Business plan
Tasks
- Recovering something you saw
- Meeting follow-ups
- Scheduled summaries
Scenarios
- End-of-day recap
- Client project tracking
- Building a second brain
Key features
Local-first Capture
Screen Pipe runs entirely on your machine, storing screen frames, app text, and audio in a local database you can inspect at any time. There's no cloud dependency on the free tier, and you can pull the data out through the local REST API or the MCP server whenever you want. For anyone uneasy about sending a full record of their work activity to a third-party company they don't control, that design choice is the entire point.
MCP Server for AI Assistants
One command registers Screen Pipe as an MCP server, after which Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, and any MCP-compatible tool can query your screen history directly. Your assistant can answer questions like "what did I work on this morning" with real context instead of guessing. It's the feature that makes everything else useful. Raw capture without AI access is just a big folder of data.
Scheduled Workflows
You can install automations from a task library or describe your own. A scheduled task might draft meeting notes when a call ends, push a daily summary to Obsidian, or sync tracked time to Toggl. These run on-device and can use a local model. Sensitive workflows don't have to leave your computer.
App Connections
Screen Pipe hooks into tools you already use, including Slack, Notion, Google Calendar, Obsidian, Toggl, HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoom, and PostHog. You connect each one once, then make it available to the workflows you approve. No custom scripts. No copy-pasting context between apps. That convenience is easy to underestimate until you've done the manual version for a month.
Screen, Audio, and OCR Capture
Text comes mainly from accessibility APIs, audio from local transcription, and screen frames fill the gaps with OCR when text events miss something. That layered approach means you rarely lose the thread. So what if the content was only ever visible as pixels? OCR still catches it. That's the difference between a tool that works and one that quietly misses half your day.
Privacy Controls
You decide what gets captured. Exclude specific apps, windows, or URLs, and redact sensitive fields on your device before anything syncs. On the paid Business tier, you also get centralized policies and audit trails for rolling the tool out across a team. Not perfect. Nothing that watches every window is. But it's more control than most recording tools offer.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Runs locally by default, so your screen and audio data stays on your own device unless you upgrade.
- The MCP server plugs your work history straight into Claude, Cursor, and other AI assistants.
- Works across macOS, Windows, and Linux, which few capture tools bother to do.
- Scheduled tasks turn raw recording into finished output like notes, recaps, and time logs.
- Granular privacy controls let you exclude or redact specific apps and URLs.
Cons
- Power-hungry capture can drain battery and disk space on laptops, so you'll notice the cost on long days.
- The free plan limits searchable history, which means most of the useful context sits behind the $21/month tier.
- Shared context between teammates isn't included even on Business, so team-wide memory stays on the roadmap.
Frequently asked questions
It records your screen and audio 24/7 and turns that into a searchable memory your AI tools can use. People reach for it to recover something they saw on screen hours earlier, get automatic meeting notes without typing a word, and track how their time actually gets spent across apps.
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