Hey Siri, take a memo

Fri, 28 Sep 2018

When I’m preparing a new talk for speaking engagments, it often begins as a messy process. I’ll jot down an outline, then I’ll go over it in my mind while I’m driving or doing chores. In those moments, when I’m doing other stuff, I find voice memos to be super useful.

I’ve been using a program called RecUp (formerly DropVox) that begins recording immediately when I start the app, and saves the resulting file to Dropbox. It’s an incredibly solid app that I have relied on for years. When I’m back at my desk, I listen to the voice memos & transcribe them — that gets my brain going, helps me flesh out the outline.

Today I upgraded to iOS 12, and I saw that the native Voice Memos app now syncs with iCloud. And there’s a new shortcut to ask Siri to begin recording a voice memo (Settings → Voice Memos → Siri & Search → Shortcuts).

It’d be tempting to switch if this worked while the phone is locked, because that’s the only thing I dislike about my RecUp system. I can say, “Hey Siri, open RecUp” and the recording begins ... but only if the phone is unlocked.