Flow: Voice Notes
Inspiration
Flow was born from a personal struggle and a desire to help creative professionals manage their mental load and declutter their thoughts. The inspiration came from:
Personal Experience: Co-founder Paris, a dynamic fractional Chief Marketing Officer, faced a tumultuous period in her life. Amid personal upheavals and career transitions, she struggled with:
- Overwhelming mental load
- Difficulty capturing and organizing thoughts
- Challenges in maintaining work-life balance
- Creative block due to cluttered mind
Existing Tools' Limitations: While using a simple speech-to-text app helped, Paris found it lacking in:
- Proper organization of transcripts
- Ability to build upon existing ideas
- Features to stimulate creativity
Collaborative Vision: Paris shared her struggles with Steve, a seasoned tech developer. Together, they envisioned an app that could:
- Capture ideas on-the-go
- Organize thoughts effectively
- Stimulate creativity based on user's past inputs
Market Need: They recognized that many creative professionals face similar challenges in:
- Managing information overload
- Maintaining creative flow
- Balancing work and personal life
Technological Opportunity: They saw the potential to leverage AI and speech-to-text technology to create a tool that could serve as a true creative companion.
This combination of personal experience, identified market need, and technological opportunity inspired the creation of Flow - an app designed to help creatives achieve 'flow of mind' and enhance their creative productivity.
What it does
Flow is an intelligent transcription app designed specifically for creatives. Here's what it does:
Transcription and Idea Capture:
- Converts speech to text, allowing users to capture ideas on-the-go
- Enables idea capture during activities like walking, commuting, or between meetings
Intelligent Organization:
- Summarizes and categorizes ideas seamlessly
- Creates structured summaries with key points highlighted
- Allows users to categorize, tag, highlight, and search notes
Task Management:
- Creates to-do lists from voice notes at the tap of a finger
- Identifies actionable items and next steps from transcribed content
AI-Powered Creativity Enhancement:
- Reviews notes and brainstorms new ideas using AI
- Learns from user's entries, ideas, style, and context over time
- Provides suggestions that build on original ideas while maintaining user's authenticity
Personalized Organization:
- Offers flexible organization options to suit individual preferences
- Helps declutter the mind by making ideas actionable and easy to develop
Seamless Idea Expansion:
- Allows users to expand on existing ideas using speech-to-text
- Groups related notes together for effortless idea development
Creative Flow Facilitation:
- Designed to help users reach a state of uninterrupted creativity
- Reduces mental clutter to enhance clear thinking and creativity
Work-Life Balance Support:
- Helps manage mental load and reduce stress
- Improves productivity, potentially leading to better work-life balance
By combining these features, Flow serves as more than just a transcription tool - it's a creative companion that helps users capture, organize, and develop their ideas while maintaining their creative flow and reducing mental clutter.
How we built it
We did a ton of research prior to starting the project and began using other products in the same space. We noticed that a lot of products were offering similar feature sets to what we envisaged, but there was a lack of personality and creativity in the products. It didn't spark the same feeling as what we wanted to achieve.
We went through a design iteration with the basic feature-set. The initial functionality was to capture voice, transcribe the contents, save to a local database and then view all notes easily. We worked through wireframes and then went through high-fid design iteration to get it to the style and brand we wanted to follow.
The mobile app was built utilizing the Kotlin Multiplatform framework. We chose this as we wanted to deploy the app on multiple platforms (iOS, Android, Web, MacOS) whilst achieving the native-feel that users deserve. All the data and network layer, along with the business logic is shared Kotlin code, then the interface was built using SwiftUI - the Android app which is in progress is being done through Jetpack Compose.
Privacy was a key concern, especially with handling users' private notes. We built the app local-first. We then built out a fully encrypted AES-256 syncing mechanism so that all transcribed notes and audio files were encrypted client-side prior to sending to the server. This functionality was needed as we wanted to allow users to use Flow on whichever device they owned (iPad & iPhone, Android Tablet & iPhone etc) whilst respecting that their notes are for their own eyes only.
Challenges we ran into
As Kotlin Multiplatform is a new technology, we had to extend and manipulate existing frameworks to make it work for this platform. We also had to upgrade our AI services multiple times (due to the pace of innovation in this space) whilst building to ensure we're using the latest and greatest models commercially available.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Launching! Always a win to get 1.0 live on the App Store, shortly followed by 1.0.1 and 1.0.2.. We've been able to get some great feedback by building a waitlist and have been actively testing and working on feedback for 3-4 weeks prior to launching.
We've had some amazing feedback about the app design, receiving comments like 'calming', 'clean' and 'feeling different but familiar'. We really wanted to have an app that reflected a flow state and we've got so many ideas to make it even better.
What we learned
Trying to build iOS & Android at the same time is hard when you're trying to launch. Over time we spent more time focusing on a single platform (iOS) to get it to the polished state we wanted and then we're bringing Android to the same state. Kotlin Multiplatform does make this easier as all the logic and view models are shared, so we should be able to focus purely on the UI side. This will allow us to rollout quicker on other platforms too.
What's next for Flow: Voice Notes
So many things! We've been using our own product so much and have collated a roadmap of over 50 more enhancements we want to make. We're going to launch the Android version soon and then continue building and innovating. We've only just got started with the base functionality and we can't wait to build more.
A feature we're particularly looking forward to is Smart Summaries. Inside the app we categorize and group similar notes together. We're going to enhance this to allow users to interact with these notes whether that's through integrations with their existing work tools, asking questions about the notes through AI, and bubbling up tips and highlights to users in a proactive way. Which keeps the AI powers busy, whilst allowing our users more time for creative thinking.
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