Voice Journaling on Apple Watch

Ayumi includes an Apple Watch app for capturing a thought before it’s gone. You record on your wrist, and your iPhone does the transcription and writes the journal entry.

Recording

1. Open Ayumi on your Apple Watch
2. Tap Record — grant microphone and location access the first time
3. Speak. A waveform moves with your voice, so you can see the microphone picking you up
4. Tap Stop

Recording keeps running when you lower your wrist or the screen turns off.

Start and stop with Siri

Say “Start recording in Ayumi” to Siri on your Apple Watch to begin, and “Stop recording in Ayumi” to finish. You can capture a voice journal entry without touching the screen.

Live comments on your wrist

With Live, AI personas can comment while you record on the watch. Tap the comment bubble on the recording screen and turn on Live comments. The watch relays your audio through Ayumi on your iPhone, so the iPhone needs to be nearby with Ayumi open, and Allow Live from Apple Watch turned on in its agent settings. Comments appear as a short thread under the timer, as text only.

If the link to the iPhone drops, Live ends and the watch keeps recording. See Live Comments.

Complications

Ayumi offers two complications. Press and hold the face → Edit → Complications → pick a slot → choose Ayumi, then either:

Complication	What it is
Record	A microphone. One tap opens Ayumi ready to record.
Today	A readout of today’s writing. Tapping it also lands on the recording screen.

Both come in the circular, corner, inline, and rectangular styles.

Reading the Today complication

The gauge shows one thing: today’s characters against a usual day. Full means you have written as much as you usually do. It stops at full, and the rectangular style spells out the real figure when you go past it — 143% of 1.8K.

A usual day is the median of the days you actually wrote on in the last 30 days. Today is left out, so the target doesn’t chase you as you write, and blank days are left out, so a quiet week doesn’t drag it to zero. With fewer than three days of history the average stands in, and until there is any history the gauge stays empty with a dashed track.

Two numbers sit alongside it:

Character count	What you have written today, abbreviated — 842, 1.2K, 12K
Sync queue	Recordings still waiting to reach your iPhone. Hidden when there are none

Where each one lands depends on the slot. The corner hangs the queue off the start of the bezel gauge and the count off its end; the circular puts the count inside the ring with the queue as a badge beneath it; the rectangular fits all three on one line.

Note

The numbers come from your iPhone, so a watch that has been out of range shows what it last heard. It catches up the next time the two are together.

Syncing to your iPhone

Each finished recording is handed to your iPhone automatically. When it arrives, it joins the same transcription queue as a recording made on the phone and becomes a normal journal entry — with the audio attached.

The entry keeps the time and place of the recording, not of the sync, so a memo that syncs hours later still lands on the right moment.

Note

watchOS decides when a transfer actually runs, so delivery isn’t instant. The watch shows “N waiting to sync” while recordings are still pending, and opening the watch app is what usually gets a stalled queue moving. The count clears only once your iPhone confirms it has queued the audio, so nothing is dropped on the way.

Tip

Your iPhone doesn’t have to be nearby. Recordings wait on the watch and transfer when the two are back in range.

Transcription

Transcription happens on your iPhone, not the watch — watchOS has no speech recognition. A watch recording uses whatever engine the phone is set to: on-device by default, or Gemini when you have a key configured and want the recording reshaped. See Voice Recording.

Audio quality

Watch recordings are 16 kHz mono AAC. That’s voice-grade and about a third the size of the phone’s 44.1 kHz setting, which matters because the watch-to-phone link is the slow part. A typical voice memo transfers comfortably; recordings made on the iPhone keep the higher quality, unless Live is on.

Requirements

watchOS	10.0 or later
iPhone	Ayumi installed and paired
Transcription	Runs on the iPhone — on-device needs no setup, Gemini needs a key
Live comments (optional)	iPhone nearby with Ayumi open, and a Gemini key