I wanted to automate my voice notes - pocket the phone (or watch), walk and talk, then send the transcript to my agent for processing. So I built Ramble for myself.
It's a simple app. An on-ramp into your systems. Free. Open source. No accounts.
Why a new app? 1) Apple Voice Memos are great, but no way to automate the result. You're also stuck with Apple's transcription (it got slightly better in iOS26 but still not the best) 2) Voice transcription in Claude / ChatGPT / messaging apps is built for short back-and-forth chat, not capturing a 10-minute walking ramble. They also don't let you record offline on Apple Watch. 3) I wanted a minimal distraction-free app to record thoughts and trust they'll be delivered. Nothing more.
I've been using Ramble on my phone & watch for months. Talk-to-think became a regular habit and I started getting real value from it. I highly recommend long-form talking to voice notes as a way to process your thoughts, regardless!
Some technical notes:
Native iPhone + Apple Watch, SwiftUI, no third-party deps. App is < 2MB.
Recordings and transcripts stored locally on device. Watch recordings work offline and sync to the phone when in range.
Default transcription is Apple's on-device SFSpeechRecognizer (free, offline). Cloud models (Groq, Deepgram, OpenAI, etc) are optional and route through a stateless Cloudflare Worker that forwards audio and returns text. Nothing persisted server-side. It's all in the repo if you want to verify.
The proxy uses Apple App Attest instead of accounts: each request carries a DCAppAttestService assertion proving it came from a real copy of Ramble on a real device. That's how the cloud tier is gated without ever asking for an email.
Webhooks are sent from device - the transcript POSTs to a URL, signed HMAC-SHA256 with a per-user secret so the receiver can verify it. Pipe it into n8n, an agent, whatever.
Landing page: https://goodloop.dev/ramble/
Repo: https://github.com/Jpoliachik/ramble-ios
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ramble-voice-notes/id676185775...
Feedback welcome