Jonathan Tollefson

My best ideas show up while I'm doing something else. They arrive whole, in my own voice, and they don't care that I'm going 29 mph on my bike. Keeping one used to require some sort of context switch: grabbing my laptop, a pen, whatever was near, which meant leaving the place the idea was born.

By the time I'd typed it, I had a note about an idea.

Now I click one button on my wrist and speak my mind freely. Ideas, calendar events, jokes: nothing is required of me. I have a sonic vacuum on my wrist with one analog switch that turns it on or off.

All of the hard work is handled by transcription. The program I built transcribes what I say and decides what kind of "thing" it is.

• TASK something I need to do
• IDEA something I may want to archive or elaborate on later
• EXECUTE things obvious enough for the system to complete on its own, like adding a reminder or an event to my calendar

The craziest thing about this build is that I first scoured the market to buy a simple wearable microphone, with the goal of seamless transcription and access to the recordings.

Humane's AI Pin overheated, then its servers went dark. The Limitless Pendant came closest, until Meta bought it and stopped selling it. Bee records everything, which felt like surveillance with a summary. The Stream Ring has the right gesture and a ship date I'm still waiting on.

They all wanted to be a companion. I just wanted a button.

So I took an old Apple Watch, stripped it down to that one job, and built the rest in a weekend.

When someone's gone, their voice is a different thing than their photo.

A course I took in college called Sound Studies taught me how much of a moment lives in its sound, and I've been hitting record ever since.

My phone never caught on. Photos get faces, places, and search. Recordings get a date, a duration, and a name like New Recording 47. I had thousands, spread across phones and laptops and drives: technically saved, practically gone. Every so often I'd open one by accident and be wrecked by how good it felt to be back there. Then a year would pass before I found another.

So I built the library I kept expecting someone to sell me. Every recording gets listened to and named for what's in it. Every word is searchable, the way photos are. Every waveform is something I can see, trim, and keep.

The quote, the laugh, the idea from three summers ago: seconds away.