Use Cases

Ayumi is a voice diary. Press record, talk, and what you said becomes a written entry with the date, the weather, and where you were. This page shows where it fits into an ordinary day, what people record, and simple ways to look back later. Everything here works right after installing the app — no accounts, keys, or technical setup.

Everyday moments

Most thoughts don’t arrive at a desk. They show up when your hands are busy and your phone is in a pocket. These are the moments Ayumi is built for, and none of them needs any setup beyond installing the app.

First thing in the morning

Before the phone fills up with other people’s messages, say what you woke up with: a dream that’s still there, how you slept, the one thing today is really about. It takes less than a minute, and it gives you something to compare against when you record again at night.

Dreams fade within minutes of waking, so this is one place where speaking clearly beats typing. Talk before you get up, in whatever order the pieces come back, and don’t worry about making sense of it until later.

On a walk

Walking is good thinking time, and it’s the easiest place to start a voice journal. Start a recording, lock your phone, put it in your pocket, and talk. The recording keeps going with the screen off, and you can stop it from the Lock Screen or the Dynamic Island without unlocking.

Talk in the order the thoughts come. You don’t need to make a point — pauses, half-sentences, and “actually, no” are fine. When you get home, the walk is waiting as an entry, with the weather and the place it was recorded.

While doing chores

Washing up, folding laundry, cooking — the hands are busy and the mind wanders. That’s when the thing you’ve been putting off finally sorts itself out, or the reply to a message comes to you.

You don’t have to dry your hands to capture it. Say “Start recording in Ayumi” to Siri on your Apple Watch, talk, and say “Stop recording in Ayumi” when you’re done. On iPhone, an Action Button or Back Tap shortcut does the same with a single press.

After the gym

Right after a workout is a good moment to note how it went — what felt heavy, what was easier than last week, how you slept, what you’ll try next time. A few sentences now beat trying to remember on Sunday.

You can leave your phone in the locker. Record on your Apple Watch; the recording waits on the watch and goes to your iPhone when the two are back in range. The entry keeps the time and place you recorded it, not when it synced.

On the way home

The commute is where the day settles. Thirty seconds on the walk to the station — what happened today, what’s still bothering you, what you want to remember tomorrow — is often enough to close the day out. You don’t need to speak up, either. Recent transcription models pick up a whisper quiet enough that people nearby won’t catch it, and they keep up even when you talk very fast. If you’d still rather talk somewhere private, record when you get in the door.

In the car

A drive is often the longest stretch of the day with nobody else in it, and the cabin is quiet enough that the built-in microphone picks you up from a mount or a pocket. Start the recording before you pull out — from the Lock Screen, with the Action Button, or by asking Siri on your Apple Watch — and then leave the phone alone. Ayumi keeps recording with the screen off, so a twenty-minute commute can become a single entry.

Before bed

A short recording to empty your head before sleep: what’s on your mind, what you’ll do first tomorrow. Say it out loud and it’s saved, not circling around in your head. Read it back in the morning.

Making it a habit

Habit	How Ayumi helps
Keep the start as fast as possible	Bind recording to the Action Button, Back Tap, or a watch complication so there’s nothing to open first.
Don’t aim for length	A single sentence counts. The Today complication on your watch shows how much you’ve captured against a usual day.
Read back once a week	Each entry has its date, weather, and place. Skim the week in Ayumi, or try one of the ideas in Look back without any setup.

For more on getting started with a personal practice, see What Is Voice Journaling?.

What people record

There’s no right topic. These are a few that work especially well when spoken rather than typed.

Sorting out how you feel

When something is bothering you, saying it out loud often untangles it faster than thinking in circles. Talk until you run out of things to say. You don’t need to reach a conclusion — getting it out of your head is the point. Reading it a week later, you’ll often see the situation more calmly than you did at the time.

Three good things

At the end of the day, name three things that went well and why. Keep them small: a coffee that was better than usual, a reply you finally sent, a conversation that went somewhere. Say what was good about each one, then stop. Good moments are for savoring, not analyzing, and the research page explains why a few weeks of this lifts mood.

Family and kids

A first word, a funny thing your child said at dinner, how a grandparent’s story went. These details fade quickly, and they’re easier to capture by voice than to sit down and write. Add a photo from your library to the entry (Add Photo in the editor on iPhone) so the words and the picture stay together. See Attachments.

Travel

Record a few minutes at the end of each day of a trip: where you went, what you ate, who you met. Each entry keeps the place and the weather, and the map view shows your trip as pins you can tap to reread. See Writing Entries.

Health and doctor’s visits

When did the headache start? Did the new medicine help? Short notes as things happen are more reliable than trying to remember in the waiting room. Before the appointment, search your entries or filter by a tag such as health and you have the timeline ready.

The same goes for counseling or therapy. A few words before a session about what you want to bring up, and a few afterwards about what stayed with you, make the next session start from somewhere.

Books, shows, and hobbies

Finished a book or a series and want to talk about it? Do it now, while it’s fresh. If you enjoy this, try making it a regular show for an audience of one — see Self-Podcast.

Work and study

A minute after a meeting, while it’s fresh: what was decided, what you agreed to, what you didn’t say. At the end of the workday, three sentences — what got done, what’s stuck, what’s first tomorrow — close the day better than a to-do list does. Your journal lives in your own folder, so it’s a safe place to say what wouldn’t go in a status report.

If you’re studying, say in your own words what a lecture or chapter was about as soon as it ends. Explaining it out loud shows you what you understood and what you only recognized. Before an exam or a presentation, talk the nerves out; the research page has a short version of why that helps.

Add a tag like work or study so these entries stay separate from the rest of your week.

Practicing a language

Talk for a minute in the language you’re learning — about your day, what you ate, what you’re planning — and then read the transcript. Where the words don’t match what you meant to say, you’ve found something to practice. Over a few weeks the entries show how much longer you can keep going.

Ideas and to-dos

The idea that comes in the shower, the errand you remember on the train. Say it in one sentence and stop worrying about forgetting it. Mark the ones that matter with a star so you can find them later with the favorites filter.

Ideas backed by research

If you’d like a reason behind the habit, What the Research Says About Voice Journaling rates what studies have found and ends with practical ways to use Ayumi. These are the ones that fit an ordinary day:

When	Try this
Before bed	Empty your head — say what’s unfinished and what you’ll do about it tomorrow.
Before you start work	Say the plan out loud — the first step, not the whole day.
Before an exam or a talk	Let the nerves out for a few minutes beforehand.
On the way home	Step back — what would a friend say about today?
Something you keep returning to	Talk it through for three days in a row, then leave it.
A good moment	Savor it instead of analyzing it.
End of the day	Name one step forward, however small.
Once a week	Read back — the dates, weather, and places help the week come back.
With a parent or grandparent	Ask them to tell their story, one period of their life at a time.

Look back without any setup

Recording is half of it. These are easy ways to read back what you said.

In Ayumi

What you want	How
Find something you said	Type in the search bar on the journal list. It searches titles and text.
Read one topic	Add tags like `family` or `health`, then filter the list by tag.
Keep the important ones	Star an entry and turn on the favorites filter.
Revisit places	Open the map view and tap a pin.
See your progress	Open Statistics from the menu to see how much you’ve recorded this month and over the past year. See Statistics.

Ask an AI chat app about your day

You can have an AI summarize your day without any special setup.

On the journal list, tap the copy button next to a date header. Every entry from that day is copied, oldest first.
Open the AI chat app you already use, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude.
Paste, and ask something like:

These are my voice diary entries from today.
What was on my mind most? Is there anything I kept coming back to?
Suggest one small thing I could do tomorrow.

Go further with Google’s tools

If you use Google’s apps, two guides show how to look back over weeks or months instead of a single day:

Look Back with Gemini Notebook (NotebookLM) — ask questions about a month of entries and get answers that quote the days you said it, or listen to an audio summary of your month.
Gemini Personal Intelligence — let the Gemini app draw on your journal alongside your mail, photos, and calendar.

For technical users

Ayumi saves each entry as a plain text file (Markdown) in a folder you choose, so people who write scripts or use AI coding tools can build on it — scheduled reviews posted to Slack, a personal knowledge wiki, or turning spoken ideas into code changes. None of this is needed to use Ayumi. If it interests you, see:

Automate Your Journal — scheduled reviews, a knowledge wiki, and idea-to-pull-request pipelines
Use Transcripts as Context in Codex and Claude — work with your spoken notes in desktop AI tools

What Is Voice Journaling? — how to start and why it helps
Voice Journaling Research — what studies say about writing and talking through your thoughts
Apple Watch — record from your wrist
iOS Shortcuts — start recording with the Action Button or Back Tap
Writing Entries — tags, favorites, search, and the map view

From the same maker: Kitae, a dead-simple strength-training log

Follow Ayumi: X (@AyumiJournalApp)