Show HN: Building an Audio Journaling App – Looking for Community Insights

[antonynjoro]

I am a product designer by profession, and recently, I ventured into coding and started developing applications. Today, I'm excited to share a project I've been passionately working on.

The concept is a voice-activated journal: just voice-record your thoughts, and the app will transcribe them into text.

I built this to help those like me who struggle to build a journaling habit. Also has features that encourage habbit building like a streak/tracker and a threshold marker encouraging you to record a minimum amount.

I used OpneAI Whisper to power the transcriptions which means you can record journals in most common languages and it will transcribe it accurately.

I am hoping to get feedback from all of you:

Would you use this? If Yes, how often? If No, What would hold you back?

Would you pay for this? If yes: How much, If no: what if added would make you want to pay for it?

Screenshots: https://arc.net/e/FC0B1AEB-707C-4294-B737-B7D9E4E6D67E

[tikkun]

To get more feedback from HN, I'd suggest a demo that can be tried without signing up / signing in.

See also: Audiopen

Side note: (Most of) Your customers might not be on HN. Your (paying) customers are probably people who already have paid for other journaling apps, or people who are already paying for Otter.ai and do voice journaling with Otter. I'd suggest prioritizing feedback from people who are already paying users of other products that they use multiple times per week for audio journaling, that way you know you're listening to people who'd plausibly become users.

[antonynjoro]

Thanks for this feedback. Makes a lot of sense. I'm pretty new to all of this. Do you have any suggestions of effective ways to reach people using these apps?

[fosterfriends]

I'd be more excited about this if it was an iOS app with data stored locally / through iCloud syncing. You could run the whisper API locally. That would get rid of any security concerns, which will always be a hot topic with journaling.

That being said, I like the idea of the project! Ive been really enjoying using the whisper interface for talking to ChatGPT and other products. My preferred form of journalling would be a short private discussion through a whisper API - its much more natural and fast than typing out my feelings and thoughts at the end of the day.

[jamil7]

> You could run the whisper API locally

There's a system framework for doing this on iOS which I'm fairly sure is multilingual, no idea how it stacks up though.

[antonynjoro]

That's a cool Idea. Thanks!

[lancesells]

The biggest thing for me with any journaling app is privacy. Anything going off-device and not staying local is an automatic no from me. Anything using OpenAI is another no from me.

That said, I think it's a nice idea and would think it's best for mobile devices and needs to be easy to open/use. Like Apple's Voice Memos but better. I think a great combo would be speech-to-text, but also a search function that combines text but also speech-to-text. Provide Shortcuts for power users, etc.

[antonynjoro]

This makes a lot of sense. You would be recording what would probably be very intimate thoughts so it makes sense why you would be concerned. Thanks for the feedback. I think the search suggestion be a good addition to the app.

[manas-bam]

This is so coincidental! I just built this exact thing as a terminal program yesterday. Here's the demo: https://twitter.com/bamitsmanas/status/1688824051471687680?s...

What do you guys think of it?

[Raed667]

When I record myself I usually end up with an ungodly amount of "ehhh" .. "humm" .. and other pauses that I don't notice in live speech, but then becomes very annoying in recordings.

Can Whisper remove those from the final transcript?

[antonynjoro]

Yeah. Whisper does a good job of removing the pauses and filler words. This is the main reason I chose to use it.