Congruence: a very personal app Ā· section 3/8

There is a notes view you can reach within the app, but that’s not why I love this feature. Here’s the list of notes (you can see some are tagged priority/sticky at the top):

Note: I had AI seed some fake data to avoid sharing my real notes…

And within a note, there are ā€œsectionsā€ which can be edited, and of course new sections can be added through the input bar at the bottom.

But the magic of this note feature lies in the quick-capture experience. From either the lock screen or the control panel (or the homepage of the app, or within other modules…) you can trigger a capture. Here’s my phone’s lock screen, with voice and text capture buttons (and a ā€œnopeā€ icon, which we’ll get to later):

Once you do that, you’re right in the app, either typing in the active text field or recording an audio note. Audio notes are automatically transcribed to text. Once you’re done typing or recording, you hit either the ADD or AI buttons:

Either way, a new note is created (assuming you’re doing this outside of an existing note). If you hit ADD, the note is simply created with whatever content you put in (text or audio file + transcription). But if you hit AI, the content is sent off to AI to get a response. You can configure whether this is Apple’s local foundation models — so the content never leaves your device — or any remote model of your choice.

This is a wickedly fast way to get an AI response (or just take notes). Tap button on home screen, talk at it, it gets transcribed near-instantly by Apple’s local transcription, and AI replies right there.

There are of course also ways to export or share whole notes or sections, edit them, and more. This is by far my favorite on-the-go note capture experience I’ve seen. The voice / transcription modality combined with plain notes combined with optional AI combined with a ā€œsectionsā€ paradigm is exactly what I want.

Of course, it all syncs to the desktop app too (which I’m not showing here since I haven’t yet wired it up to handle fake data).

There’s also a secret (shhh) feature. With a certain gesture on the notes screen, you get pulled into a special, hidden note that requires FaceID to open. Great for storing door codes and PINs and such.

Next up: meditation.

Congruence: a very personal app Ā· section 3/8

Want to hear about new essays? Subscribe to my roughly-monthly newsletter recapping my recent writing and things I'm enjoying:

And I'd love to hear from you directly: andy@andybromberg.com