Recording memories

For some reason I cannot quite explain, sometimes I feel the need to organize my thoughts about the past. On one occasion (in 2014) I recorded a summary of my life up to that point, not because I thought it was extraordinary and important to preserve, but because it gave me some sense of direction. That recording is most likely lost, and that’s fine.

These days I have felt the same urge, but I realized that if I wanted to record everything relevant or irrelevant that has happened in my life in the last 36 years, it would take me an extraordinary amount of time and energy to accomplish. I want to do it but I just don’t want it “that much”. Unless there is a way to reduce the cost to a level I find acceptable. And surprise surprise, there happens to be one.

Nowadays, AI transcription of audio into text is surprisingly accurate: it is not perfect, but it is good enough for what I want. I subscribed to a service called VoiceNotes that allows me to take voice notes. I installed an extension that allows me to send audio messages to WhatsApp (the same way I would send them to a friend), and the messages are automatically transcribed into text and stored online. Then, I used an Obsidian plugin that allows me to download all the markdown notes to my vault (and add a timestamp to them).

So now taking notes has become an incredibly easy task. Talk about whatever you want, for as long as you want (some of my notes are more than 30 minutes long), and the machines will decipher the sound and translate it into text.