AI-powered tools like OpenAI’s Whisper have enabled many applications to make transcription an integral part of their feature set for personal note-taking, and this space has quickly grown as a result. Apps like AudioPen, Cleft Notes, and TalkNotes have proliferated in app stores and across the Internet, but most offer a fairly limited feature set: They let you record notes and transcribe them, with some offering voice-over capabilities. summary, but there is a long way to go. in terms of the functionalities offered.
The latest app in the space is Voicenotes. Built by the founder of creator advice platform Buymeacoffee, Jijo Sunny, and his wife Aleesha, Voicenotes aims to stand out by including an AI assistant that lets you ask questions about your past notes, in addition to providing various features like as summaries and different formatting options. .
The developers said in a video that after she suffered a miscarriage, to distract herself, they began creating a voice notes tool with Jijo’s brother and co-founder of Buymeacoffee, Joseph Sunny. When the couple visited medical professionals, they took lots of voice notes to capture everything the nurses and doctors said so they could remember that information later. This also fueled the idea of having a transcription tool on hand so they didn’t need to reread notes repeatedly to remember details.
Jijo and Aleesha delivered the first version of the app in March to selected testers, and made the web app public in April.
The app itself
The Voicenotes web app doesn’t require a connection: you can directly tap Record and start speaking and the app will transcribe.
You can only record voice notes up to one minute long, unless you pay for the tool. Once you stop recording, you can tag notes, edit them, and regenerate titles using AI. It also lets you use AI to reformat the note – turning it into a blog post, tweet, to-do list or email – and the app will also generate a summary of the note and list the points main.
There’s also an “Ask My AI” feature, which lets you verbally search through your notes using the AI assistant – if you want to remember which brand of dishwashing liquid you’ve added to your grocery list two months ago, for example.
The company has now released iOS and Android apps. This is a big advantage, considering that Cleft Notes only works on Mac and iOS (still in beta). Although AudioPen can be accessed as a web app from anywhere, it cannot record in the background on iOS: if your smartphone screen is locked or if you switch to another app , it will stop recording.
Voicenotes also uses AI to nudge you with prompts that you can respond to and record notes.
Competition and roadmap
Voice Notes bring useful functionality, but as we mentioned above, they enter a space that quickly becomes cluttered. It also faces competitors that offer better features. Cleft Notes, for example, allows on-device transcription (an important point because it keeps your notes private instead of sending them to a server for transcription), has better Apple integration, and lets you save notes up to 10 minutes in the free tier. AudioPen gives you a ton of additional options for formatting your notes, which some may find useful.
Besides competing with other AI-powered voice note apps, Voicenotes also has to compete with native apps like Google’s Recorder on Pixel and Samsung’s Transcribe Assist. Both apps are only available on select models, but they might trickle down to other models. technology advances.
The biggest risk for all of these apps would be Apple adding transcription to its Voice Memos apps, as this would essentially make third-party apps redundant on iOS devices. Still, it could be helpful to offer cross-platform compatibility, better formatting options, and additional features.
You can try Voicenotes for free or pay $10 per month to unlock access to better models like GPT-4 Turbo and Claude Opus, as well as remove note length restrictions. For a limited time, you can also pay $50 for a “believer” plan and get access to the app for life (read: as long as the developer continues to support it). The company said it has already earned $100,000 in revenue from subscriptions.
Jijo told TechCrunch via email that the app’s differentiation will be its “simple yet elegant design,” use of top AI models, and “Ask My AI” functionality.
He added that Voicenotes will soon be available on smartwatches and wants to expand its functionality across platforms as a real-time assistant. Additionally, it also works to turn voice notes into to-do lists with reminders.
techcrunch
