We rebuilt our powerful, fully private voice recorder, and it runs on the device in 17 MB

You've had the same three people in your meetings all month, and you'd like to know what you still owe each of them. Smart Voice 2.0 tells you who's speaking in every recording, and it gets better at it as you go. Once it knows someone you talk to often, they get their own folder with every meeting they were in, what was discussed, and what's still open with them.

Edit the words and the audio follows

The transcript is the editor. You hold a word to pick it, then cut it, bleep it or shorten the pauses, and the audio is rebuilt around what's left. Undo has no limit, and you decide whether to keep every version or only the final one. Recording over a voice note works the way it does in Voice Memos, except you can do as many takes as you like.

To share a moment, select its lines and tap share. Smart Voice makes a video with the words on screen, with the pauses shortened if you want, ready for a chat or a post. You can also export the transcript as Markdown, SubRip, WebVTT or JSON, or send the audio itself.

Small, fast and on the phone

Transcription runs natively on the device. In our testing it's faster than Whisper and runs cooler while being just as accurate. It's a 17 MB download on iPhone and under 50 MB on every platform, and there are no models to download after you install it. For languages Apple's model doesn't cover, Whisper fills in, so it supports more languages than ever.

It's also careful with your phone. In Low Power Mode it stops transcribing in the background. The Action Button starts a recording from anywhere. Long archives can be compressed, so the audio takes less space while the transcript stays whole.

Your recordings stay yours

Back in 2019, a crash during testing could cost someone a recording, so 1.x kept split backups people could recover from. 2.0 keeps saving through whatever happens to the phone.

Privacy was the point of Smart Voice in 2019, and it hasn't moved since. There are no ads, and we've never sold or processed anyone's recordings. Sync now runs through iCloud only, so there's no account to make, and you choose which recordings sync and which stay out of Siri and Private Cloud Compute.

The Apple Watch and iPad apps are rebuilt too, and the next version brings Smart Voice to iPhone Duo. The Mac app is on its way, kept in sync through iCloud.