Voice notes that don't vanish.
The thought arrives on a walk, in the kitchen, between meetings. Back at your Mac, speak it into any notes app before it fades — and unlike every note you've ever lost, this one stays findable. Audio and text, searchable forever.
Acousmos is not another notes app to migrate to — it works with the one you already use. Press a hotkey in Apple Notes, Obsidian, Bear, or a plain text file, talk naturally, and clean text lands at your cursor. Behind that, every note keeps its original audio in a private archive on your Mac, full-text searchable in English and Chinese. Your notes stay where you like them; the archive makes sure you can always get back to what you actually said.
Three things a voice note needs.
1 · Land where notes belong
No separate inbox to triage later. Dictate straight into the notes app you already trust — the Minimal style keeps your phrasing intact, Shape organizes a rambling thought into a clean note, Verbatim takes it raw. Each on its own hotkey.
2 · Stay findable — and replayable
The archive keeps the master copy of every note: original audio plus text, full-text searchable. "That pricing idea from the walk in March" is three seconds of search away, and you can press play and hear yourself say it. It's the voice memo you can search like text.
3 · Private enough for a journal
Everything stays on your Mac — never collected, never trained on. Pro adds fully local, offline models: a diary entry can go from your lips to your disk without touching any cloud, airplane mode included.
From idea capture to a spoken diary.
Idea capture
Speak the thought before it evaporates. Find it forever.
Morning pages
Three spoken minutes before coffee. Archived, dated, searchable.
Meeting debriefs
Talk through what was decided while it's fresh — your own words, kept.
Voice diary
A journal you speak. Replay any entry in your own voice, months later.
Reading notes
Dictate the quote and your take into Obsidian without leaving the book.
Anywhere capture
Any app with a cursor is a notes app now — even a commit message.
Questions.
Can Acousmos replace Apple Voice Memos?
They're different shapes. Voice Memos records audio files you have to listen back to. Acousmos turns your speech into text at the cursor — in Notes, Obsidian, or wherever you keep notes — and keeps the original audio alongside the text in a searchable local archive. If you want notes you can search and read, this is the better shape. If you want long raw recordings of lectures or interviews, a recorder is the right tool.
Where do my voice notes live?
Twice, deliberately. The text lands in whatever app you dictated into — Apple Notes, Obsidian, Bear, a plain text file. And the master copy — original audio plus text — lives in the Acousmos archive on your Mac: full-text searchable in English and Chinese, open format, exportable anytime, kept whether or not you stay subscribed.
Is it private enough for a journal?
The archive stays on your Mac, nothing you say is ever collected, and your voice is never used for training. On Pro you can go further: route transcription through your own API keys, or run fully local, offline models so a journal entry never touches any cloud at all.
Can I replay what I said?
Yes. Every dictation keeps its original audio in the archive. Search for a phrase, find the note, and play back the moment you said it — your own voice, months later.
Also see Acousmos for writers, for developers, or how Acousmos compares.
One month of Pro, free.
No signup, no card. Speak the next idea instead of losing it.