Documentation

Voice Inbox is a privacy-first initiative to ensure your data remains yours:

1. Vault stays local: Nothing from your Obsidian vault ever leaves your device, and our anonymous analytics never touch your vault's content.
2. No retention: Transcription and calendar event recognition are the only features requiring internet access. We do not retain recordings or transcripts after processing.

For more details, please see our Privacy Policy.

To use Apple's built-in speech recognition:

1. On the Home view.
2. Tap the pencil icon at the bottom-right.
3. When the keyboard is present, tap the microphone at the bottom-right.

Using this is free and fast, but the accuracy is significantly lower.

More here: Dictate text on iPhone - Apple Support

Recordings should be relatively short, ideally under 15 minutes. You can record many entries, but not a single excessively long one. The recording feature is not designed for long-form content like meetings; recordings over 50 minutes are not currently supported.

While Voice Inbox is designed to work seamlessly with Obsidian's Daily Notes, you can choose to use Single File mode.

This allows you to add all your entries to a specific file of your choice (e.g., inbox.md) within your vault. You can also configure whether new entries are appended to the end or prepended to the top of the file.

While Obsidian integration is a core feature, you can set the journal location to Local.

In this mode, your notes are stored safely on your device within the app. This makes Voice Inbox a powerful standalone "voice-to-text" inbox for capturing thoughts on the go, even if you don't use Obsidian.

Voice Inbox is intentionally designed as a lightweight capture tool, not a full-featured editor or even an Obsidian alternative. The idea is to quickly capture whatever is on your mind and perform heavy editing later on a larger screen.

A major benefit of this approach is that you don't have to worry about accidentally modifying or deleting anything in your Obsidian vault while you're in a hurry or on the go.

Learn more about our philosophy in The Say-and-Go Method.

To jump back to the most recent journal entry from any historical view, tap on the date displayed at the top of the screen.

TLDR

Both examples below produce the exact same incrementing list (0, 1, 2) when viewed in Obsidian:

Option A (Manual)

0. First
1. Second
2. Third

Option B (Easy - Use the '0.' button)

0. First
0. Second
0. Third

When using the quick input bar in the editor, you'll notice a 0. button for creating numbered lists.

In Markdown, you can use the same number for every item in a list. When the note is rendered (in Obsidian or other Markdown viewers), it will automatically be displayed as an incrementing list (1., 2., 3., etc.).

How it works

If you prefer starting from a specific number, simply change the first number:

Why use "0."?

1. Easier Maintenance: You can reorder, add, or remove items without ever having to manually renumber them.
2. Standard Markdown: It follows standard Markdown specifications, ensuring your notes look great in any viewer while staying easy to edit in "raw" text mode.

On the Inbox view, the icon at the top-right of each entry indicates its current processing state.

Prerequisites:

• "Add Calendar Events" is enabled.
• Permission to access the calendar must be granted.
• A calendar event can only be added via voice entries.

Unlike voice assistants like Siri, there's no need to say:

Add an event to my calendar ...

Instead, simply mentioning the event and date will work. For example:

I'll talk to Sam about the project tomorrow at 10 a.m.

These are the details of the event that you might include in the recording:

• Title
• All-day
• Start Date
• End Date
• Location
• Notes

If no event is recognized, the Calendar button for the entry on the Inbox view will be greyed out; otherwise, an event will be added to your Calendar. Click the button for details.

Currently, events in the past are ignored.

Events will be added to the default calendar configured in the Calendar app.

Check the Choose a default calendar section on this page: Change your Calendar settings on iPhone

Editing events directly within Voice Inbox is not currently supported.

Modifying existing calendar entries requires "full access" permission to the Calendar, which is a sensitive permission to ask for.

If you require this functionality, please provide feedback via email to help us prioritize future development.

Voice Inbox uses advanced AI to turn your voice into text with high accuracy.

Every time you record a note, a powerful computer (server) works behind the scenes to process it. Think of it like a utility, such as electricity or water: there is a small cost every single time it's used.

The Two Types of "Lifetime" Apps

You've likely seen many apps offering lifetime purchases. To understand why we don't, it's helpful to categorize how those apps typically work:

1. Apps without ongoing costs (Fair & Sustainable)

Many great apps (like a simple calculator or a local-only note taker) don't have to pay for anything every time you use them. For these apps, a lifetime purchase is a fair and sustainable model.

However, when apps try to provide complex features like voice-to-text without an ongoing cost, they have to use lower-quality tools that run entirely on your phone. This results in significantly lower transcription accuracy compared to the human-level accuracy that Voice Inbox provides.

(Voice Inbox also offers a free, lower-quality option via Apple's built-in speech recognition.)

2. Apps with ongoing costs (Risky or Privacy-Invasive)

Some apps provide cloud or AI features but still offer a lifetime purchase. This is a very risky model. If the company stops getting enough new users, they may eventually run out of funds to pay for the processing that powers their existing "lifetime" users. To survive, these companies often have to "feed" on user privacy—selling your data or using it in ways you wouldn't approve of.

Independence and Privacy

Voice Inbox is an independent, privacy-first project, not a big tech corporation. We don't have a secondary business of selling your information or training models on your data.

Our only source of revenue is the subscription you pay. This ensures that:

1. Your privacy is absolute: We are never pressured to monetize your data to cover our bills.
2. The service remains reliable: We can always cover the ongoing costs of the high-quality AI processing you use.
3. Long-term support: You can count on Voice Inbox being around for years to come, focusing solely on providing you with the best experience.

We want to build a tool you can rely on for the long haul, without worrying about it disappearing or compromising your values.