Docs/Voice/Voice Recorder
Voice

The Voice Recorder

4 min read

The Voice Recorder is for the long things - a meeting, a walk, a drive, ten minutes of thinking out loud. You record on your phone, it goes up to your Gateway on its own, and the transcript comes back on the phone and in the Cockpit. It is not dictation: dictation is a sentence you speak into a prompt, this is a recording you keep.

Opening it

  • On your phone - Voice Recorder in the menu, under Assistant. Older bookmarks to the retired native app's Notes and Record screens land here too.
  • In the Cockpit - Voice Recorder in the left rail. That side is for reading and keeping; the recording itself happens on the phone.

Recording

One card at the top holds everything about the recording in progress: a running clock, what it is doing (Idle, Opening microphone, Recording, Paused, Saving), how many segments it has captured, and a level meter so you can see it is hearing you. Beneath it is a title box you can edit at any point until you stop.

Record starts it. While it runs you get Pause - which finishes the open segment and suspends capture - and Stop. There is no time limit, and recording continues while you use the rest of the app.

Warning
Keep the screen on. If the phone locks or the browser suspends the page, the microphone is cut: the recording then stops, saves everything it had captured, and says on its row that it was cut short. Nothing already recorded is lost, but nothing after that point was recorded.

While you are recording there is a Notes while recording box. Type a line, press Add, and it is kept with the time it was added at, so "he says the deadline moved" is pinned to the minute it was said. The notes travel with the recording.

Nothing waits on a good connection

The recording is written to the phone in segments as it is captured, before any network work at all. Reload the page and it is still there. Close the app in the middle of recording and you are offered it back on your next visit, with the segments it had finished intact.

Stopping both finishes the recording and queues its upload - there is no Send step. If the upload is interrupted, the row parks as saved on the phone with a plain reason and a Retry, and delivery resumes on its own the next time the app is open and the connection is back. A resumed upload picks up at the first segment the Gateway does not already hold, so nothing is sent twice.

Note
A browser that cannot store data durably cannot do any of this, so the recorder says so and disables recording rather than starting one it might lose.

The list, and its two ticks

Under the controls is every recording, newest first, with its date, length and segment count. Each row carries two independent statuses - Uploaded and Transcribed - and they never collapse into one, because a transcription that fails does not un-upload the audio. A row in flight says which segment it is sending; a row waiting says so; a row whose transcription failed says that the audio is safely uploaded.

Play plays it back. View transcript opens the text on the phone once it has been transcribed. A recording that never got delivered can be discarded, which asks once before it does it.

Reading it in the Cockpit

The Cockpit's Voice Recorder page is the comfortable place to read one. Each recording is a card - title, subtitle, when, how long, how many segments, and a badge for its state. Click it to open the transcript, and from there:

  • Play audio - plays the segments in order.
  • Copy path - copies the transcript's path on the Gateway, available once the recording has been transcribed.
  • Save to vault - keeps this one permanently. Recordings are held locally and are temporary; this is what makes one stay.
  • Delete - removes it, after a confirmation.

The Title, Subtitle and Summary are yours to edit on the card, so a recording that arrived with a placeholder name can become the thing it actually was. Copy agent info copies the endpoint and directory an agent needs in order to work through these transcripts itself.

Your dictionary applies here too

Each segment is transcribed on its own, and the assembled text is then run once through the same cleanup pass every other voice surface uses, against the same dictionary you edit in the Cockpit. Teach it a term for dictation and your recordings get it right as well.

Tip
Say the names first. A recording that opens with the people, the repository and the project it is about gives you a transcript you can search later, and shows you within a minute which words your dictionary is still missing.

What it costs

Transcription is part of Pro, the same as dictation - there is no key to supply and nothing extra to buy. Every new account starts with 14 days of Pro. If transcription cannot run, the recording is not lost: the audio stays uploaded and the row marks the transcription as failed.

Where to go next