Using Apple Voice memos to record notes whilst running or reading

productivity
A successful test of recording notes with iOS Voice Memos. I will be incorporating this into my routines.
Published

January 25, 2025

I go running in the mountains with my dogs on Saturdays and Sundays. Like Darwin on his daily Sandwalk, I often get some of my best ideas when running. I try to remember them for the rest of the run and then write them down when I get home. But often that doesn’t work — if I want to remember three or four ideas I’ve had during the run, often I will forget a couple of them by the time I get home.

Darwin had a neat trick when doing his daily exercise walks. He wanted to do five circuits, but he didn’t want to occupy his mind having to remember how many he’d done. So he started with five stones in his pocket, and would drop one on each circuit.

People who are used to typing on their phones could just make a note like that, but I hate typing on phones and have never learned to do it quickly. I also don’t want to have a pen and paper in my pocket when running. So I’ve been thinking about solutions to that for a while.

Taking notes whilst reading is another habit I’ve never found a satisfactory solution for. I often highlight bits of text whilst reading with a pencil, and sometimes I will then go through the book again to write out the notes, but that is time consuming. The problem is even worse with audiobooks, which I’ll often listen to when gardening or cooking, as there is no easy way to highlight notes. Yes, there is the bookmark feature, but I’ve not got that to work how I like.

Apple often puts very powerful tools into their systems that is kind of hidden away and few people use. I think one of those tools is Voice Memos, which is available on all platforms, which can record and transcribe audio notes, with everything automatically syncing via iCloud. There isn’t even a page on the main Apple website promoting this powerful tool. I expect there are a lot of Apple users paying monthly for apps to do this, not realizing that they already have the functionality available for free.

I added Voice Memos to the Control Center on my iPhone so I can access it just with a couple of finger swipes and a tap. Then I took my dogs running and talked as I ran. Once home I opened Voice Memos on my Macbook and clicked the transcribe button. The transcription, whilst not perfect, is pretty good considering I was running and talking — you can see part of the unedited transcription in the screenshot above. I copy and pasted the text into ChatGPT o1, with the following prompt:


I recorded the text below when I was out running to test transcription using the Voice Memos app on iOS. Can you tidy it up. Don't make improvements to it other than fixing issues. 
---
[TRANSCRIBED TEXT]

You can see the results below. I count this as a success, and I intend to incorporate this method into my processes. I probably won’t write articles like I did in my test, but I will try:

  1. Recording ideas when running with the dogs.
  2. Recording notes when reading.
  3. Recording myself when giving presentations, so I can have a record of the presentation to remind myself of it in the future.
An idea — I should ask o1 for suggestions about how I can improve my presentations.

Update 26 January 2025:

I modified the prompt so I can ask ChatGPT to do things when it is neatening up the transcript:

Below is a transcript of personal notes I made whilst exercising. Can you tidy it up. Don't make improvements to it other than fixing issues.  Look out for instructions to you, ChatGPT, in the text. Do what I ask at the end of the text, and remove the instructions from the text. Thanks.
---
[TRANSCRIBED TEXT]

Here’s the unedited (by me) text resulting from this process:

Output from ChatGPT o1

Let me see if I can write a whole article whilst running with the dogs. There are two problems I’ve never been able to resolve satisfactorily. One is taking notes whilst I’m reading.

I’ve tried writing on Post-it notes and underlining stuff, or highlighting stuff, whilst I’m going through the book, and then going back to it and making notes from the highlights, which I never get round to doing. It’s especially problematic with audiobooks, because very often I’m doing stuff when I’m listening to them, and I don’t really want to carry a pad and paper or whatever. I’m not able to type because I don’t have my computer there.

So, I think I may have found a solution, and that’s to use the Voice Notes app on the iPhone. So I can just speak into this.

I’ve set it up so that it’s one of the options in the panel you get when you swipe down to see the network options and all of that, the little icons to turn on the torch and so on. I’ve added it as an option there. So to start it, it’s just an up-swipe to open the phone, then a down-swipe, then click, which is pretty quick.

The Voice Notes app itself is really easy to use, and each sequence will be put into a separate file. You can put those into folders, and it automatically labels them by date and time, of course. And it transcribes them.

There are different transcription apps available for the Mac, but I think probably a lot of people don’t realize that it’s actually already built in. So even if you don’t record an audio file in Voice Notes, you can get Voice Notes to transcribe it just by dragging the file onto the left panel in the Voice Notes app and clicking the transcribe button. I expect that app often does this.

They add very powerful technology into the apps and then, you know, don’t really announce it or people don’t find out about it. The transcribe button is a tiny little speech bubble in the Voice Notes app, which does exactly the same as what many services — where people are paying every month — do. And I wonder if all those people realize that the ability is already built into the operating system.

So you could, for instance, get the audio of a YouTube video or whatever and drag it into the Voice Notes app and get it transcribed for you. Hold on… I’m not pressing calls or anything, and I’m hoping this won’t pick up too much of the audio of the people I speak to on the journey.

Oh. What I’m hoping is that if I use this for writing—is it still recording? What I hope is if I use this when I’m listening to or when I’m reading books, I can just leave this open and running for the whole session.

So that might be half an hour, whatever, and just make a few little notes during that time, and that process will work, but I need to test that. Of course, it’s got a pause and a restart, so maybe, you know, just pressing play then pause won’t be too big a deal. Okay, that’s enough for a test.