macOS menu-bar app · MCP-native memory

One on-device brain every AI app can subscribe to.

SecondBrain quietly captures the actual content of what you do — messages, pages, docs, anything on screen — keeps it encrypted on your Mac, and serves it over MCP. One brain, every app.

Download for Mac See how it works

Free to get started · no credit card

◍ On-device⌘ macOS⬡ MCP-native✦ Private by default

Ambient memory

A companion on your shoulder that remembers everything — so you never re-explain yourself to your AI.

SecondBrain quietly captures what you do on your Mac and keeps it as your own memory — right on your device. It fills the blind spots every AI has, no matter how many integrations you bolt on. Plug it into Claude, ChatGPT or Raycast, and switch whenever you like. Your memory is yours, and it comes with you.

On-deviceYours to keepWorks with any AINo lock-in

Download free

A person working on a MacBook with a parrot perched on their shoulder, watching the screen — SecondBrain's ambient memory

Watch the demo

See SecondBrain in 2 minutes.

A quick walkthrough of the menu-bar app — how it quietly captures what you do, keeps it on-device, and hands the context to Claude.

The gap

Attention isn't memory.

Most tools log that you were somewhere. SecondBrain remembers what was actually there.

Typical memory tools

They log attention

app · window title · URL · timestamp. They know where your eyes went. Re-open it, search it, and the content you actually need is gone.

app: "Mail"
title: "Inbox — 42 unread"
url: —
at: 14:07

SecondBrain

It captures content

The real text — what was said, written, shown. OCR'd screens, browser innerText, doc bodies. The thing you'd actually want an AI to recall.

source: "Mail · OCR"
body: "Ship the v2 build by Fri,
  Priya needs the staging link…"
thread: "Launch checklist"

How it works

Capture → encrypt → serve.

One quiet pipeline runs on your Mac. Everything before MCP stays local.

Your Mac

Whatever's on screen, in the foreground

→

Capture layer

OCR — on-screen textBrowser innerTextAccessibility tree

→

BrainStore

Encrypted SQLite + FTS5, full-text indexed, on-device

→

MCP server

Local endpoint · subscribers: Claude · your apps · 3rd parties

The MCP surface

Three tools. One brain.

Everything a subscriber needs to orient, recall, and act on your context.

search_memory

Recall anything

Full-text search across everything you've captured. Ask for it in plain words, get the actual content back.

latest_context

What's on screen now

The newest events with their full body — the live picture of what you're looking at this moment.

active_threads

The orient step

Recently-active apps, people, and threads. The fast “where am I, what am I in the middle of” lookup.

Meetings

Every meeting, transcribed on-device.

Your mic and the room — captured, labeled by speaker, and dropped straight into your brain. Searchable forever. Never leaves your Mac.

Today

Yesterday

Client call — Acme renewal● On-device

ThemBefore we renew — can you remind me what the new SSO pricing looks like?

YouSure, SSO is included on the Team plan now, no add-on. I'll send the updated quote today.

ThemGreat. And we'd want to start the rollout the first week of August.

YouNoted — first week of August. I'll loop in onboarding so they're ready.

Transcribed locally · audio never uploaded

Privacy is the whole pitch

Your brain never leaves your Mac.

On-device only

Capture, OCR, indexing, storage — all of it happens locally. There's no cloud account, no sync server, nothing phoning home.

Redacted before it's read

Sensitive surfaces are skipped at the source — they never make it into the store in the first place.

You hold the keys

The store is encrypted on disk. Nothing leaves the device except the exact rows a subscriber explicitly requests over MCP.

It's your data

Your brain is a plain local store on your Mac. Open it, export it, or wipe it anytime — no account, no cloud copy.

Never captured

These get skipped before SecondBrain reads the screen:

⊘Password managers⊘Banking & CRED⊘OTP screens⊘Card numbers⊘Seed phrases⊘Incognito windows

Captured on-device. Shared only on explicit request.

For developers

Build on the brain.

Don't build another capture pipeline. Subscribe to the one that's already running.

01

One local endpoint

Point your app at SecondBrain's MCP server. It runs on the user's machine, against the brain they already captured.

02

Skip the hard part

OCR, accessibility, browser capture, redaction, full-text indexing — already solved. You just call three tools.

03

A shared memory bus

Every app that subscribes reads the same brain. The user captures once; the whole ecosystem recalls it.

.mcp.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "secondbrain": {
      "command": "/path/to/secondbrain-mcp",
      "args": ["--stdio"]
    }
  }
}

Where it's different

A memory bus, not another silo.

SecondBrain

Yours, on your Mac

Truly local — runs on-device
Captures everything on screen — not just supported apps
On-device OCR — reads any window, even native apps
Private by design — your brain stays on your Mac
A shared MCP bus other apps build on

Typical cloud memory apps

Hosted & closed

Cloud — your data lives on their servers
Closed — you can't see how it works
Integration-limited — only supported apps
Your memory lives off-device
A standalone product, not a shared layer

Benchmark

Memory that actually recalls.

LongMemEval-S — the standard test for long-term memory in AI assistants. Higher is better, and SecondBrain runs it fully on-device.

94.3%

71.4%

40%

82.1%

55.6%

48.1%

Single-Session User

Recalls what you said earlier in the same chat.

Single-Session Assistant

Recalls what the assistant said earlier.

Single-Session Preference

Remembers and applies your preferences.

Knowledge Update

Uses the latest version when a fact changes.

Temporal Reasoning

Reasons about when things happened.

Multi-Session

Connects facts spread across many chats.

Measured on our own LongMemEval-S harness, fully on-device. What do these benchmarks mean? →

Give your AI a memory you actually own.

Install once. Capture quietly. Let every app you trust subscribe to one brain.

Download for Mac See how it works

Free to get started · no credit card