Moment Notes

Moment Notes is a voice notes app I built with Alec Richter, my co-founder at Tap Five.

I designed the app and its brand, built the website, and contributed to the code, doing most of my implementation work with coding agents. We launched on the App Store in June 2026.

The problem

A recording preserves what was said. It still leaves you to find the idea, remember the follow-up, or listen again for a detail.

We treated capture and recall as a single design problem: get a thought into the app with very little effort, then make it useful when you come back.

Capture

We had recording and live transcription running before the interface was settled. Using that build throughout the day led me to organize the home screen around two primary actions: Record and Ask.

Ask answers questions about past recordings, such as “What did I say about the pricing model?” The answer links back to the source notes, so they can return to the original context.

I put the recording controls at the bottom of the screen and made recording the primary interaction. Beyond the app itself, we brought recording to the Lock Screen, Action Button, Shortcuts, and Apple Watch. Capturing something shouldn't require navigating through the app first.

Making notes easier to read

There were two parts to making a recording easier to read: how the note was laid out, and how much generated text it contained.

I separated the summary and transcript into tabs, so someone could read the processed note and switch to the original words when they needed more detail. I implemented that layout and refined the playback highlighting in the app. It shipped in our first update.

The amount of generated text was a separate question. An early tester described the title and summary as two layers of the same thing. Reading short recordings myself, I noticed the same repetition in the key points.

We explored using a cleaned-up transcript instead of a summary for short notes, which would reduce repetition without summarizing at all. The tradeoff was two different note formats, which risked making the app feel inconsistent. We left that question open; the shared tab layout was the change we shipped.

Privacy

Moment Notes offers both on-device and cloud processing. During internal testing, we found that switching to cloud processing could include previously private recordings in a daily summary or an app-wide answer. A mode selector alone didn't explain what would happen to existing notes.

We excluded private notes from cloud-generated summaries and app-wide Ask responses. I designed and built notices that appear beside the affected content, explaining why specific notes weren't included. The same privacy logic needed to make sense in three different contexts: when recording, when reading a summary, and when asking a question.

Tasks

Moment Notes pulls action items from recordings and lets people add them to Apple Reminders.

A checkmark could suggest a task was already complete when it had only been sent to Reminders. I paired the action with an explicit “Added to Reminders” confirmation and applied that pattern consistently wherever the action appeared in the app.

Brand and website

I designed the Moment Notes brand and built the website alongside the app. The website leads with a simple promise: “Capture the thought before it's gone.”

I paired that message with examples of recording through the Action Button and Apple Watch, then showed how a recording becomes a useful note. The page connects the ease of capturing a thought with what someone can do with it later.

How we worked

By the time we were building Moment Notes, coding agents were capable enough that I could take on much more of the implementation directly.

I used Figma to establish a direction, then built and refined interactions in the app with agents. I could try an idea, adjust it in real use, and send Alec a working branch to review. The note layout and the reminder confirmation pattern both came out of that loop.

Working directly in the app let me carry a design decision through implementation and refine it through everyday use. The handoff to Alec included a working interaction he could try and review.