Set in an alternate present where technology forked in the 1930s, so the whole office is analog. Switchboards, pneumatic tubes, cassette decks, no screens anywhere.
Your colleagues are flat standees with three expressions each, and every one of them is facing you no matter where you stand in the room.
Good Morning, {Employee Name}. PCVR, out later this year.
The app organizes notes in your language even when you speak another, and flips between both. It is the reason I built it. I think in Arabic and English in the same sentence.
It sat behind a settings toggle that was off by default. So unless you went looking, the app just looked like every other notes app.
Found it during a redesign while checking screens for leftover purple. Shipped it on by default. Existing choices still respected.
My voice notes app had a problem I could see in the numbers. More than half the
people who installed it never finished a single note, and of those who did, only
a quarter came back for a second one. The app was a great tool with no reason to
open it tomorrow.
So the last release added almost nothing to the core feature and a lot to the
routine around it:
A morning brief at whatever time you pick, with your tasks, your deadlines and
your meetings. It uses no AI at all, just your own local data, which means it
costs me nothing and is free for everyone forever.
Gentle follow ups on things you said you would do, once a day maximum. Done,
tomorrow, or let it go. No streaks, no guilt mechanics, ever.
One question every Sunday about what you promised people that week.
I am watching two numbers now: how many people finish a first note, and how many
come back for a second. Will report back when I know.
hree weeks ago my app looked like every other AI app: dark purple,
glowing gradients, neon everything. It worked, but it looked like a tech
demo. The thing my users actually love is quieter than that. They talk,
and it writes things down.
So 1.2 became a full redesign. Warm paper, ink, a serif for your words,
the red margin line from a real notebook. The app finally looks like what
it does.
The update also adds the features people kept asking for: recording from
the Apple Watch even offline, a morning brief of your tasks and meetings,
and Ask Your Notes is now free for everyone, 5 questions a month. The
free plan never expires and there is no trial, the free tier is the trial.
It listens in any language, even two mixed in one sentence. That was the
original reason I built it, my brain switches between Arabic and English
mid thought and no app could keep up.
Happy to answer anything about the redesign or the solo dev grind.
A few weeks ago I launched ActionNote here's the short version, you talk and your rambling comes back as a title, a summary and a task list with reminders. I built it because my own voice memos were a graveyard I never listened to.
Since launch the thing users kept telling me was some version of "the idea always shows up when my hands are busy". So the update that just went live is all about that. You can say "Record with ActionNote" and it just starts recording, then "Stop recording in ActionNote" and it saves and organizes itself, works even from the lock screen. There's also a widget now, one tap and you're already recording. And you don't need an account anymore to try it, your first note works before any sign up.
The stuff people liked at launch is still there. It handles Arabic and English mixed in the same sentence, you can share a WhatsApp voice note into it and read the summary instead of listening to seven minutes of audio, and you can ask questions across everything you've captured.
Notes live on your phone and your own iCloud, I don't have a database. Free for 5 notes a month, iPhone, iOS 16+.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/actionnote-voice-to-tasks/id6789915282
Honest feedback is welcome, bugs especially. This community was good to me at launch so thank you for that.
This sub cares more about systems than apps, so genuine question about the capture layer.
My problem: thoughts arrive when I'm walking, driving, or half asleep. Typing loses them, and recording a voice memo just moves the loss to later, because nobody replays their own rambling. My voice memos were a graveyard.
Full disclosure, I got frustrated enough that I built my own tool for this (voice in, organized summary and tasks out), so I'm biased toward voice capture being viable. But building it raised more questions than it answered, and this is the crowd that would know:
Do you capture by voice at all today, or has it never stuck? If it died for you, what killed it, the replay problem, the transcription quality, or the friction of moving it into your real system?
For those with a serious Notion or Obsidian or Bear setup, what would a capture tool have to produce for you to trust it as the front door? Clean Markdown? Direct API export? Deep links? Or is anything short of living inside your main app a dealbreaker?
Mixed-language speakers, does any tool in your stack handle switching languages mid sentence? This was my personal breaking point with everything I tried.
Not linking anything, this is not a promo post. I would genuinely rather build the bridge people would actually cross than guess.
This sub cares more about systems than apps, so genuine question about the capture layer.
My problem: thoughts arrive when I'm walking, driving, or half asleep. Typing loses them, and recording a voice memo just moves the loss to later, because nobody replays their own rambling. My voice memos were a graveyard.
Full disclosure, I got frustrated enough that I built my own tool for this (voice in, organized summary and tasks out), so I'm biased toward voice capture being viable. But building it raised more questions than it answered, and this is the crowd that would know:
Not linking anything, this is not a promo post. I would genuinely rather build the bridge people would actually cross than guess.
This sub cares more about systems than apps, so genuine question about the capture layer.
My problem: thoughts arrive when I’m walking, driving, or half asleep. Typing loses them, and recording a voice memo just moves the loss to later, because nobody replays their own rambling. My voice memos were a graveyard.
Full disclosure, I got frustrated enough that I built my own tool for this (voice in, organized summary and tasks out), so I’m biased toward voice capture being viable. But building it raised more questions than it answered, and this is the crowd that would know:
Not linking anything, this is not a promo post. I would genuinely rather build the bridge people would actually cross than guess.
A few weeks ago I posted here asking what a capture tool would actually need to work for an ADHD brain, because my ideas kept dying in voice memos. It took me a while to come back because the app was stuck in review, but it’s finally out.
Full disclosure, because you’ll work it out from the dates anyway: the app was already built and sitting in App Store review when I asked that question. I didn’t mention it because I wanted honest answers about the problem, not feedback on my thing. Those are different questions and you only get one of them once people know you’re selling something.
So I’m not going to claim this thread shaped what shipped. It didn’t. It shaped how I think about it, and what I build next. That’s the honest version.
The thing I had wrong. I thought the problem was capture. u/DonWithAmerica said voice memos are a nightmare because he can’t be bothered to listen to himself trying to find the right words for concepts still forming in his mind. Recording was never the hard part. Listening back is worse than never recording at all. I’d built the right thing for the wrong stated reason, which is a weird feeling. The app never makes you replay anything: you talk, it comes back as a summary, key points and tasks, and the audio just sits there in case you want it. I’ve replayed maybe three notes in six months.
The workflow that already existed. u/stonetelescope described doing record, transcribe, dump into Gemini, tell it to pull out the gold, put it into Keep. Manually. Every time. That’s my entire product done by hand, which told me two things: the demand is real, and the only thing I’m actually selling is deleting four steps.
The criticism I still can’t answer. u/Raukstar said the tools take away the work you need to put in, so no refinement, no reasoning, no critical thinking. I think that’s the strongest argument against this entire category and I don’t have a clean rebuttal. Where I landed is that there are two kinds of thoughts: ones you need to work out, where paper genuinely wins, and ones you just need to not lose (bring bread, call the dentist back, the thing you promised someone on a call). The second kind doesn’t deserve reasoning. It just evaporates. I only built for the second kind.
The thing I’m actually changing. u/Responsible_Camp_559’s ctrl+i inbox, dumping a thought without losing your place in the branch. Every tool makes you navigate somewhere to write it down, which is exactly the moment you lose the thread you were on. Mine still does this. You have to open the app. That’s the next thing I’m fixing and I wouldn’t have prioritised it if he hadn’t described it that precisely.
What it does: you talk, it transcribes and organizes into a title, summary, key points and tasks with reminders. Works in Arabic and English including mid-sentence switching, which was selfish, I needed that. You can share WhatsApp voice notes into it and get the summary without listening. And you can ask questions across everything you’ve recorded instead of scrolling back.
iPhone only for now. Free for 5 notes a month, paid above that. Notes stay on your device and your iCloud, not in a database of mine.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/actionnote-voice-to-tasks/id6789915282
Not asking for anything. If you want to tear it apart, that’s more useful than upvotes.
Looking for testers before launch.
You record a voice note (or share a WhatsApp one in) and ActionNote turns it into a title, summary, key points, and a to-do list, so you never have to sit through your own rambling. Handles Arabic and English, including switching mid-sentence.
Would love help stress-testing:
- Recording + processing on older devices
- Any language other than Arabic or English
- The share extension (sending audio in from WhatsApp, Voice Memos, Files)
- Anything that crashes or comes back wrong
iPhone, iOS 16+. Free while testing.
I'll read and reply to everything.
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