Voice notes are easy to record and almost impossible to use later. You end up scrubbing through audio trying to find the one thing you said last week.
Echoes was built for an audience of one: me. I wanted a place to talk through ideas on a walk, and I wanted to test how far I could push API calls and AI inside an app before betting a real product on those skills.
Ever record a voice note and then forget what you said? Or spend ten minutes scrubbing through audio to find that one thing?
Echoes transcribes your voice notes automatically. Talk, and it turns into text you can actually search later. You can also chat with your notes. Ask it to pull up what you said yesterday and it finds it.
There's an unfinished feature I still think about: a mind-map view that connects related notes. Record a note about the grocery store one Sunday, record a meal idea ten days later, and Echoes draws the line between them.
Record
Hit record and talk. Brain dump, meeting notes, random ideas in the shower. Whatever you need to capture.
Transcribe
Echoes uses AI to turn your voice into text. Fast, accurate, and happens automatically.
Search
Need to find something you said last week? Just search. No more scrubbing through audio.
Build it as a test bed, not a product
Echoes was where I learned to wire AI into an app: transcription, chat-with-your-notes, connecting related ideas. Those skills went straight into everything I shipped after it, including Ripple's entire AI pipeline.
Don't ship it
It would have been easy to polish Echoes and push it to the App Store like everything else. I didn't. It solves my problem, it taught me what it needed to teach me, and not every project earns a launch. Knowing which ones don't is the skill.
Echoes is currently in beta testing. Want early access? Message me on Twitter.
@_jamesmck