Why voice notes?
I've recently made a few updates to my voice notes flow, removing various sources of friction and streamlining the experience. I figured I'd share a few details about that so other people can replicate it.
Use a smartwatch as the main input device
It's configured in a way that recording is started on double-tap of one of the watch buttons
Two issues with the older iteration of the process motivated this bout of improvements
when I go to sleep - I leave my phone (which used to be the main input device for taking voice notes) away from my bed to avoid doomscrolling instead of sleeping sleep hygiene
but often when I drift away to sleep (or when I wake up at 3am), I'd have a thought that I'd want to record. And as I won't have a phone on me, I won't be able to do that.
I've tried screaming at Alexa or my phone from across the room to take notes, but that never worked well. Neither was I happy with the approach of having a physical notebook close to my bed (lighting questions + it doesn't really fit into my general knowledge management practices).
even when I had the phone nearby, the experience of taking a note involved an unfortunate amount of friction
reach for the phone (which can be surprisingly non-trivial, e.g. when biking, or just getting it from tight pants lol)
unlock it (ok, technically I found a way to start recording from lock screen, but it involved similar amount of work to unlocking the phone, so 🤷♂️)
click a button to start recording
These issues suggested a shape of the solution - I needed a dedicated device that would allow me to start recording with minimal friction, and won't be a distraction in a way the phone could be.
Originally this made me look for dedicated voice recorders with ability to automatically sync recordings online
I was thinking something in form factor similar to https://www.friend.com/
Surprisingly I wasn't able to easily find a device that would fit the requirements here.
I've considered adopting Go Note Go - a project a friend of mine created for similar purposes. But I didn't really want to deal with custom hardware.
Eventually I've settled down on the smartwatch as the form factor
it is arguably more convenient compared to a necklace format
and it is a more "socially accepted" tech thing to wear
I also feel like it exists in a nice middle-ground between a single purpose device and general-purpose phone. Allowing me to derive additional utility from displaying information or programming it to trigger automations, while not unnecessarily consuming my attention.
As a bonus point, the watch being waterproof allows me to easily capture shower thoughts, which I deliberately have more space for now
One thing I was not certain about with regard to smartwatch form factor is whether I'd be able to get the friction to starting the recording low enough. As mobile devices tend to be unnecessarily constrained in how much users can customize them.
Amazon return policies and an inkling that the baseline experience is not too bad led me to give it a shot.
It took some work, but I was able to get to a place where it takes just one action (double-click) to start the recording, which I'm pretty happy with.
The rest of the post describes technical details on how to get there, as I dearly wish someone would have written this guide before.
Tools
Galaxy Watch 6
This is the watch I have. Motivation for this specific model is that it's the latest android watch model I could get for cheap 🙃. And 80% of my intended use is just voice notes 🤷♂️
another motivation was that I've read online that Samsung watches built-in voice recorder is pretty good
The voice recording app I use, there are several reasonable options but this is my current preferred one.
Automatic sync of recordings to your phone is probably the key feature you want here if you're considering other alternatives.
Baseline experience (double-press the button + tap the screen)
This is the setup you can get to without going into the weeds (which is not terrible, but not ideal). The way to do it is to
then you'd need to tap the screen to the start the recording
Going beyond baseline experience - Android Macros (AutoWear)
To further streamline the experience we need to dive into the world of Android Macros - specifically, we'd be using AutoWear
Autowear is a very confusing app to use, and mostly not designed to be used on it's own (the idea that you'd use it with Tasker, Macrodroid or similar)
But it allows you to do things not possible at baseline, in particular we'd be using it's ability to click elements on the screen to automatically start a recording.
Steps
Install AutoWear on both phone and watch
Start the AutoWear trial on the phone
if you don't - it will just give you confusing errors when you try to configure actions (without telling you that the lack of subscription is the reason)
or you can purchase it (1.6$), but trial is sufficient to do initial setup and things will continue working after it expires, so you technically don't have to buy it
but after trial expires updating configuration will not work (with the aforementioned confusing errors)
Enable one of the Launcher Apps to serve as a command trigger
On the watch, go to AutoWear -> Launcher Apps
Enable one of the apps there (I use "Command"),
This would make an icon for it appear in the list of watch apps
And you'd be able to map your double press button to this "App"
Enable accessibility access for AutoWear on the watch to make "input" commands work *
AutoWear on the phone
In the app on the phone we'd need to configure two actions to run when the launcher app is opened
App Action (to actually open the voice recorder app)
Launch App Package
com.coffeebeanventures.easyvoicerecorder
Advanced
Command To execute
Select "App open Command" option
Results in &APPOPENEDCOMMAND& text value for the command
Input Action (to click start recording button)
Command
Help setting up command -> yes
(Open the Easy Voice Recorder on the watch & make sure the watch screen is on when you're configuring this)
"Click Element"
Select "text - Record" as item to click
Results in click(text,Record) text value forthe command
Technically these two are configured as independent actions that both happen when you open the launcher app (instead of being a proper workflow where steps happen in order)
This works because the Input action has a 5 second timeout and within those 5 seconds it keeps watching for relevant element to appear on the screen and it clicks it whenever that happens.
This allows us to set things up with AutoWear only, without relying on Tasker/Macrodroid/etc and needing phone-watch communication for this to work
In watch settings - remap the double press of home key to launch the "Command" app
Things I'm still not happy with in the new flow
It takes 1.5-3 sec for recording to start after you press the button
Which is forever in computer terms. I think part of the reason for this is a cobbled together automation flow nature of this, but also just launching the app is not really instantaneous =.
Stopping the recording
To stop the recording, I need to wake up the screen and tap a button on it.
Ideally I'd just double-tap the trigger button again to stop the recording.
This is probably something I can do with Macrodroid/Tasker, but haven't looked into it yet and suspect it won't be great for performance reasons.
When you grant accessibility access to any app, the watch starts making a click sound when screen locks and you can't turn this off 😕
I found this very frustrating (though I suspect I might be relatively more noise sensetive then avg).
Thankfully, there is a mitigation - you can just lower the Media volume on the watch.
This works well for me bc I rarely if ever want to play sounds on my watch. Also, there is a sweet spot, where I can still hear e.g. the Google Assistant replies, but the click becomes imperceptible.
Misc tips
By default, the watch will hide the last app and show you the home screen, after 20s of screen turning off.
Which I found annoying for voice notes use case bc, that added number of clicks I needed to do to stop the recording.
You can make this better by changing the Display > Show last app setting to a larger value (pretty happy with 2 minutes)
It's worth noting that Samsung's native voice recorder, would just stay on screen while recording is active.
Input action stopped working
This happened to me only once so far, restarting the watch fixed it.
Appendix
Easy Voice Recorder (EVR) vs Samsung Voice Recorder (SVR)
Native Samsung Voice Recorder also very nice, and is what I originally used, but Easy Voice recorder has a slightly better UX for my purposes.
Specifically when recording stops - SVR navigates to "recording list" app screen. Which I never really want because I don't want to listen to my recordings on the watch, and especially not after I just made one.
When the app is in that state - the flow can't be triggered again, until you navigate "back" to main screen.
So stopping the recording is actually 2 actions - tap the stop button and swipe back, which is a bit annoying. In part because I'd neglect to swipe back immediately a lot of the time, and then would have to do it next time I trigger the flow & that would ruin the fluency of starting it in just one action.
EVR, on the other hand, gets into the state to start a new recording almost immediately (after a brief confirmation screen).
EVR also has native cloud upload capabilities, which can be convenient for setting up further notes processing similar to what I do in Voice notes inbox process
SVR has native transcription capabilities, but they are not as good as using Whisper or similar (which is what I do)
Finally EVR is developed by a real human that I can talk to 😛
Which gave me hope that maybe I can request changes/tweaks to further optimize this flow.
That has been a mixed success so far - the support replied to my messages, but it's unclear to which degree is the app in active development, so I don't have a strong expectation for changes I requested making it through in the near future.