Voice notes

Not everything you say is a task.

A thought with nothing to do stays a note. Notes are kept by day, and search finds them by the words you said. Every capture keeps its transcript and its recording: play it back, or find a task by words you spoke but never typed.

The recording and the words never leave the iPhone. There is no account, no server and no upload, which is also why deleting one is final: there is no copy anywhere else.

Kept: Transcript and recording
Where: On this iPhone
Recordings kept: Until you delete them
Or, by switch: 1 week · 30 days · 1 year
Search: Reads the whole note
Requires: iPhone 15 Pro or newer
Languages: English, Simplified Mandarin, Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese, one at a time

Note, or tasks

§1

01A note with things to do becomes tasks. One spoken note turns into the separate tasks it mentioned, each on the part of the day you named. How that works, and how often it is right.
02A note with nothing to do stays a note. The receipt reads Note saved · no tasks found, the note is kept by day carrying the same groups as tasks, and nothing is invented to fill the day.
03Either can be found by what you said. Search reads the note, not just the title. A task can be found by words that were only ever spoken, and the result shows the note that explains why it matched.

The recording

§2

Audio stays on this iPhone and is kept until you delete it. If you prefer, set it to be deleted after a week, 30 days or a year, in Settings; the transcript is kept either way. Deleting an entry removes the note and its recording from the phone, and that cannot be undone.

Play a recording back from its note. The words you watch appear as you talk are the same words search reads later.

What it hears

§3

On 725 recordings of our own English to-do speech, the recogniser Offhand uses got about 95 words in 100 (a 5.3% word error rate); on 800 sentences of clean read speech, about 97 in 100 (3.3%). Both were decoded on a Mac on 30 August 2026. Numbers, dates, times, currency and spelled-out codes came through 60 times in 60. The full tables, with the corpora and the conditions, are on the blog.