Audio Diary is an intelligent voice diary that enables you to capture and reflect on life’s moments. By simply talking, the AI-powered diary analyzes your day, suggests goals, and helps you practice gratitude. It serves as a personalized and secure wellness tool, actively listening to your voice to intelligently document precious moments, explore your thoughts, and set both short-term and long-term goals. In essence, Audio Diary enhances your reflection and goal-setting process by leveraging AI technology.
What’s good in the hood, folks? I’ll tell you what. Today my guest is Dara Javaherian – Founder of Audio Diary (has been generally inventing fun things for the last 10 years).
Chris: Hello, can you share the inspiration behind the creation of Audio Diary and what motivated you to develop a journaling app that incorporates artificial intelligence?
Dara: Hello, 2020 was such an unusual time for me and the world. With many social outlets severed, I turned to journaling to let my thoughts out, and while it required some discipline (and time, which I had plenty of back then!), it felt good to let my thoughts out. During this time of reflection, I realised that these captured moments were so special and valuable to me.
There were a few problems with a physical journal though:
- It takes time to write it down
- It’s easy to lose
- It’s hard to search through and have a “big picture”
- It’s not terribly secure
- I got no feedback from my input
When I saw the value in my low-fi entries, I got to work on building an app that would solve the above problems.
I had also become tired of these dopamine-grabbing apps such as Instagram and Youtube, and wanted to build an app that was essentially the opposite of these… i.e an enjoyable self-development opportunity that offered a good user experience
Chris: How does Audio Diary’s AI transcription feature work, and what level of accuracy can users expect when converting audio recordings into text?
Dara: We use OpenAI’s “Whisper”, which is absolutely brilliant and is as good as a person transcribing your entries. It’s not free, but we apply it to all user’s recordings whether they are on the paid plan or not.
Chris: The AI-powered analysis feature is intriguing. Could you elaborate on how Audio Diary’s AI analyzes text to identify key themes, emotions, and patterns in users’ journal entries?
Dara: We currently do two things: on a more granular level, we take what people say about their day and pull out lots of different information including titling it, summarising it, giving some general advice, suggesting automatic goals, and even providing a little picture depicting it. These are done to help the user remember what happened on a particular day without having to go through their entire entry, but also to give the user an overview of their day which is great for reflecting.
On the broader level we generate monthly (and yearly once we celebrate our first birthday!) summaries so our users can take a look at their journey from a much higher level.
We are excited to see what the future holds for AI and as it improves generally, we are committed to harnessing our use of AI in useful and exciting ways.
Chris: Privacy is a significant concern for many users when journaling. What specific security measures and protocols does Audio Diary employ to ensure the privacy and security of user data?
Dara: Safeguarding the privacy of our users is paramount. What we do to protect a user’s diary is:
- We secure our server and database using best practices with industry-standard encryption.
- We store audio recordings away from the server, hosted encrypted securely in Amazon AWS – who use extremely sophisticated security.
- We have data protection agreements in place with companies that process our users’ data.
With so many layers of protection for our users and very sophisticated security monitoring in place, Audio Diary is like Fort Knox!
Chris: Journaling has well-documented benefits for mental health. How does Audio Diary specifically contribute to reducing stress, anxiety, and depression for its users?
Dara: Well, we make it super easy to get your thoughts out to start! All you need to do is talk to it. We’ve also worked hard on designing the app so that it’s a relaxed and carefree space, we wanted opening the app to be an oasis of calm in an otherwise busy day.
We also designed our questions to be positive and, where possible, elicit gratitude. This is in the very fabric of our app, from the questions, to the design, to the AI feedback. And it turns out that being grateful can help so much that it can even help your physical health, saving on trips to the doctor (according to Harvard Medical School)
I know I am biased, but I’ve used the app most days since we launched, about 8 months ago, and I’ve actually made some serious lifestyle changes that I only recently connected to having a consistent journaling habit. The goals I track make a real difference in keeping me accountable to myself and my objectives and I can honestly say that I’ve been happier in myself and in my relationships recently. I’ve gotten similar feedback from other long time users of Audio Diary. Nobody has even really been using the app long enough for it to be useful in looking back. I’m looking forward to having 1-2 years of entries so that I can look back on how I was at certain points.
Chris: Are there any unique or unexpected use cases of Audio Diary that have emerged, beyond traditional journaling, and how has the app adapted to accommodate these diverse needs?
Dara: Yes! People use it in many different ways. For example, a lot of people have mentioned that they want it to work specifically for dreams, and ideas, so we added these features meaning Audio Diary seamlessly turns into a dream diary, or an ideas log. In the very near future, we will have specific sections for dreams and ideas (amongst other sections) so they can all be seen in one place. We have also worked closely with some of our users with visual impairments to ensure that Audio Diary is fully accessible for their requirements.
Chris: Looking ahead, are there any upcoming features or enhancements in development for Audio Diary that users can anticipate?
Dara: We have lots! We’ve just added a bunch of new features, such as adding photos, locking the diary with FaceID/Fingerprint, exporting your full diary (and getting a really nice PDF with all your entries in it, kind of like a book), automatic goal suggestion and the Dream and Idea categories I mentioned earlier. We have also recently lowered the price for a premium subscription (while being mindful to ensure that the free version is still useful).
We plan to add a search functionality and organise the entries in a more meaningful way, have more organised sections of your entries, a mood graph, automatically entitle ideas, analyse dreams, on top of simplifying the flow and making goals and gratitude questions more impactful.
We also are thinking about having an option to get a physical book of your diary entries printed and sent out!
Chris: In the broader context of mental health and self-improvement, where do you see AI-powered journaling apps like Audio Diary fitting into the landscape of digital tools and resources for personal growth and well-being?
Dara: The audio transcription, coupled with the useful AI analysis, is what I think sets Audio Diary apart from other self-improvement tools. Audio Diary offers a unique tool for individuals to gain deeper self-awareness, identify patterns in their behaviour, and track their emotional well-being over time, and we’re just getting started!
Chris: Thanks for being with me, any last words? Where can our readers follow you?
Dara: My pleasure. The best thing you can do is download the app and capture your life’s moments at Audiodiary.ai and if you need any help, just email us at help@audiodiary.ai. We are also on Instagram, but admittedly we don’t post often!
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