Have you ever tried to find a specific video on your phone just by remembering a word someone said in it? Or maybe you recorded a whiteboard presentation and want to find it by typing a word written on that board?

If you try this in Apple Photos or Google Photos, you will get zero results. While native apps have gotten good at identifying objects or text in static photos, they are completely blind when it comes to the audio and frames inside your videos.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to solve this problem and search inside your videos using an offline AI app called Memoria.

Why your native app ignores videos

Both iOS and Android have built-in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for photos. If you take a picture of a receipt, you can search for “receipt” or a specific word on it. However, video files are heavy. Processing the audio track and extracting text from 30 frames per second requires a lot of computing power. Because of this, Apple and Google skip video indexing to save your battery and their cloud server costs.

Your videos are essentially black boxes.

Doing it locally with Memoria

To search inside videos without uploading your entire 50GB gallery to a random cloud server, you need an app that runs locally.

Memoria is an app available on iOS and Android that does exactly this. It uses a compressed version of OpenAI’s Whisper model to transcribe the audio of your videos directly on your device. It also scans the video frames for text (OCR).

Because everything happens locally on your phone’s processor, your data stays 100% private.

How it works in practice

1. Download Memoria

Install the app from the App Store or Google Play. Memoria works as a search layer over your existing camera roll, so you don’t need to import or move any files manually.

2. Let the Smart Indexer Run

When you open the app for the first time, it will begin indexing your media. For the free tier, Memoria uses “Smart Sampling” to prioritize high-value media: it will index your recent screenshots, photos, and up to 50 videos first. Note: Video indexing uses the Neural Engine on your phone. It may take a few minutes depending on your device’s speed.

3. Search for a Spoken Word

Let’s say you filmed a lecture where the professor mentioned “Thermodynamics.” Simply tap the search bar and type “Thermodynamics”. Memoria will instantly display the video. When you open it, you will see a drawer highlighting the exact timestamp where the word was spoken!

4. Search for Written Text in a Video

The same applies to text. If you recorded a screen capture or panned your camera across a document, you can type any word visible in the video, and Memoria’s deep OCR will pull it up.

Why Offline Matters

Transcribing audio usually requires sending the audio file to a cloud API. For personal videos containing private conversations, family moments, or confidential work meetings, this is a massive privacy risk. By running the Whisper model entirely on-device, Memoria ensures your videos never leave your phone.

Ready to unlock your video library? You can download Memoria today and index your first 250 media files completely for free. No subscriptions, no cloud.