I Keep Losing My Thoughts

I Keep Losing My Thoughts

Yesterday I was trying to fix a bug. I knew what was wrong. I could feel the whole shape of it in my head. But I couldn’t explain it. I sat there trying to type it out and the words weren’t coming fast enough. By the time I got two sentences in, the rest of it had already moved on in my brain and I was chasing it.

I don’t know if anyone else has this problem. Maybe it’s just me.

I have ADHD. And I’m blind. And I’m not bringing those up for sympathy or whatever. I’m bringing them up because they’re why I built the thing I’m about to tell you about.

My brain doesn’t send ideas one at a time. They come in groups. And I can type, that’s not the issue. But when I’ve got a lot going on, or something really matters, or I’m under pressure and the thoughts keep coming, my hands just aren’t fast enough. I probably should slow down, right? I’ve tried to slow down my entire life. It hasn’t worked. The ADHD loves to get ahead of me.

Talking is easier. It just is. Doctors dictate. Lawyers dictate. Journalists dictate. I just wanted to be able to do it too.

But I’m also blind. So every app has extra friction for me. I have to listen to where I am on screen. I have to find the right spot. I have to work around things that weren’t designed with me in mind. And by the time I get to where I need to be, the thought I had is usually gone.

I’ve lost a lot of ideas that way.

Nothing Out There Worked

So I tried the apps that exist. Otter. Voice memos. The various transcription tools out there. And some of them are fine. If you’re sighted and you’re sitting in a meeting with your phone on the table, they probably work great.

That’s not my situation.

Some of them have record buttons that VoiceOver can’t even find. Some of them have these custom interfaces that look nice but are useless to me. I’m swiping around trying to figure out where anything is and the thought I wanted to capture is already gone. And the ones that do work okay with accessibility? They send everything to the cloud.

I record business stuff. Product plans. Ideas at two in the morning. Things that are mine. Not bad things, just unfinished things. Raw things. I need somewhere to think out loud without worrying about who else might be listening.

And every app I found sends your voice to a server. Some of them limit how much you can record unless you pay more.

And look, on-device transcription has been around for a while. Whisper came out and everybody started making transcription apps. This isn’t new. But that’s kind of the point. The technology is there. It’s been there. And I still couldn’t find one that worked for me. One that was accessible, private, had no recording limits, and kept everything on my device.

Nobody put those pieces together.

So We Built It

So we did.

We’ve been building this at Techopolis for months. It’s called Perspective Transcribe.

Basically you just hit record, start talking, and it writes down what you say. On your device. Not a server somewhere. Your iPhone, your Apple Watch, your Mac.

By default it uses Apple’s speech recognition, which runs entirely on your device. We also support Whisper models. For summaries and action items, it uses the same models that power Apple Intelligence. If your device doesn’t support that or you have it turned off, there’s a comparable on-device alternative. Either way, nothing leaves your phone. When you’re recording, it shows up as a Live Activity, like how Uber or DoorDash shows your order status. You can record from your Apple Watch too. And you can import audio files from somewhere else and it’ll transcribe those.

And yeah, Voice Memos has transcription now. But our app lets you chat with your transcripts. I can ask it “what did I talk about this week?” and it pulls from my recordings and gives me an answer. That matters to me because I record a lot and going back through them one by one trying to find something from three days ago doesn’t work for me. I just want to ask and get it back.

What Happened When It Broke

Earlier this week I broke the app. Something in the transcription pipeline went wrong and it just stopped working.

And honestly? My whole mood changed. I felt weird about how upset I was over an app not working. But it wasn’t really about the app. Something was off with my day and I couldn’t figure out what until I realized I hadn’t been able to record a single thought the way I normally do. I’d been using this app every day. I didn’t even notice how much I relied on it until it wasn’t there. I was back to typing everything out. Back to losing ideas and thoughts all over again.

I told Michael. He’s my boss at Techopolis. He’s been building iOS apps since 2011. He wasn’t annoyed. He just came in and fixed it. That’s what he does. He’s been doing this longer than most people have been thinking about apps.

But that moment is when I realized what this thing actually is to me. It’s not a side project. It’s how I function.

Why I’m Telling You This

I’m saying all of this because I feel like so much of what you read online about apps is just noise. Marketing speak. I don’t want to do that.

I use this app to think. I record ideas and then give the transcript to our bug tracker so it can pull out issues. I use it for action items. I use it to write posts like this one. I actually recorded this on the app.

Before it existed, I’d have an idea and tell myself I’d type it up later. Sometimes I did and the idea was half gone by then. Sometimes I never got to it at all. I’d be in bed knowing I had something worth writing down and not being able to get it out fast enough.

Now I just talk. And everything I said is there when I come back to it.

We have a paid tier called All Access. Six dollars a month or fifty a year. It’s shared across all our Perspective apps, so if you already pay for Perspective Intelligence, you’re covered. And if you subscribe through this app, you get Intelligence too. Recording is free. Importing audio and action items are part of All Access.

That money goes to developer salaries. We’re not training models on your recordings. We’re not selling your data.

The app isn’t out yet. We’re hoping this weekend.

I’ll be posting more over the next few days as we get closer.

If any of this sounds like you, if your brain works faster than your hands, if you’re tired of tools that don’t work for you, if you just want to think out loud and have it actually go somewhere, keep an eye on this.

This app means a lot to me. More than anything else I’ve worked on. I built it because I needed it and it didn’t exist.

I don’t know. Maybe this is just me. But I don’t think it is.