The notes worth having are often the ones nobody typed.

You know the moment. You're on your way somewhere with both hands full, and you remember the question you meant to ask. By the time you have a free hand, it's gone.

Talking is faster than typing. It also works when your hands are busy.

So Scratchpad records. The microphone in a note's header records straight into that note. Stop when you're done, and the recording sits in the note as a player, next to whatever else you wrote there.

A Call, Kept Where It Belongs

The case I had in mind most was a call.

Say you're on the phone with a tiler about a kitchen splashback: when he can start, which tile he has in stock, how long the quote holds. Put the call on speaker, open the note called Kitchen, and record.

When you hang up, the call is in the note about the kitchen. Not in a voice memo app under a name like "New Recording".

(Ask the other person first. In some places the law requires it, and everywhere it's good manners.)

If you already have a recording, from your phone's recorder or a meeting somebody sent you, drop the file into the note. It arrives the same way.

Turning It Into Words

Nothing is transcribed until you ask.

Press the transcribe button on the player, the one that says Transcribe this recording when you hover it. Short recordings come back in a few seconds. Anything over a minute is handed to a worker that carries on even if you close the tab, and the words arrive in the note as they're ready.

The transcript is ordinary paragraphs in the note, not text locked inside the player.

That's the part that matters. You can fix a name it got wrong, cut the small talk, and turn what the tiler said into a checklist.

In a month, typing "grout" finds the call.

Search reads the transcript too. And the recording stays, so when the words and your memory disagree, you can listen again.

Recordings are transcribed on our own servers. Your audio isn't sent to another company to do it.

What It's Good At, and What It Isn't

It's good at one person speaking clearly: a memo to yourself, a shopping list dictated in the car, a call where you take turns. On clear speech it gets most words right, and the misses are often small, like punctuation or a number written out as a word.

It's less good at:

• Names and jargon. Unusual names especially, and the vocabulary of a trade. Expect to correct a surname or a product code.
• Crosstalk and noise. Several people talking over each other, or a room with music or a dishwasher going.
• Very short clips. A couple of seconds of speech gives it very little to go on.
• Who said what. The transcript is the words, without anyone's name on them, so a call reads as one stream.

One more limit, and it's on purpose. A recording over a minute in a locked note can't be transcribed until you unlock the note. The background worker never holds a note's key, so it couldn't write the words back in.

How Much You Get

Either plan includes 20 hours of transcription a month. The count starts again when your month does, and Settings shows how much you've used. If you ever run out, the recording is still saved, and transcription comes back with your next month.

If it turns out not to understand your voice, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee: email us within 30 days of your first payment and we'll refund it in full.

The recordings page in the docs has the rest of the details.

A Small Thing That Catches a Lot

Most of what's worth remembering was said out loud, to somebody, and gone a minute later.

A note that can listen doesn't change that much.

It just means fewer of those things get away.