Show HN: Echologue – the private AI voice journal I built for myself

Posted by arisAlexis 3 days ago

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I have tried journaling many times but nothing stuck. So I decided to make my own app for myself with these features:

* Voice first

* Private first

* AI chat

* Automatic tagging, meaning extraction, and semantic retrieval using embeddings stored locally

* Export to LLM

the AI angle is especially interesting for me. It allows me to ask questions like:

* "remind me highlights and crazy nights in the last 3 months"

* "How was I feeling during my trip in Spain and how big of a problem was my breakup"

* "How would you judge my overall interactions with Marc after I told him about my problems"

the overall process is fire and forget. I just talk for let's say a minute every day or when there was something of interest.

Everything is stored on device. The AI inference is done with Zero Data Retention Endpoints. No email or anything else is kept, you are completely anonymous, I have no idea what or how people use this.

Otherwise journaling doesn't work. I can't say my secret thoughts when I know someone has a master key or can suffer a security breach.

I hope you enjoy the product as much as I do.

Comments

Comment by pluc 3 days ago

Asking an AI how you feel about a person or the highlight of a trip is such an offloading of basic human identity.

Comment by dmrivers 3 days ago

Tresor.co or cloud.near.ai could be a useful inference provider for this kind of project as these providers run inference inside enclaves which verifiably cannot peek at your data even as the hypervisor. Both are open source. Tresor.co is EU based so I'm thinking of using tresor.co for one of my projects as I trust EU regulation more for this sort of thing.

Comment by parthmule28 3 days ago

I just tried the android application, really like the privacy first approach. Would you consider adding BYOK so that a user could have complete control over where inference happens? I realize it might not fit your architecture, but it seems like a neat optional setting. Either way, neat project.

Comment by arisAlexis 3 days ago

I did consider it at one point the problem is that the prompt and instruction following for formating and extracting tags, nouns etc and the json returns are unreliable if you switch models and especially if it's an older model. right now i'm using Gemma 4 and works smoothly so it would need to be BYOK for gemma only which is doable. If more people ask I could do it sure.

Comment by sgc 3 days ago

I would not use a personal journaling app that didn't give me that type of control, so here's one more asking :)

Comment by arisAlexis 3 days ago

the best would be on device inference only but we need maybe 6 months for a small model to match capabilities yet. I wanted to do it like that but even my pixel 10 suffered.

Comment by steezeburger 3 days ago

I like the idea behind this a lot and feel the same way about my notes. I also built my own app for it and have a very similar feature on the roadmap. Cool stuff!

Comment by totallygeeky 3 days ago

Projects like this are truly baffling to me, the point of journaling is in part the reflection, which you offload to the AI system in this case. You spew what thoughts and feelings you want at it and ask it to tell you how to feel, or how good you did.

It kneecaps the precise skills and work needed to become a more whole and thoughtful person, despite wearing the skin of something that might help.

Comment by steezeburger 3 days ago

I agree with you about the merits of journaling, but I think there is a place for this kind of app still. I don't use this specific app, but I like the idea of a single dumping ground that is sorted and reviewed by AI, but not necessarily for emotional journaling but for a form of data tracking. I mean I do sometimes track my emotions, but I don't ask AI to tell me how I'm doing, though I do ask it if there are any notes that keep popping up and they might be something I need to work on. It's also helpful for managing tasks as someone with ADHD. I don't have to think about sorting notes before I even write them. I still like to journal by hand. My note taking apps aren't replacements for them. They're more for research and data tracking really. I also think it is cool to have historical data around the things you do in general. And voice can be such a frictionless ux. Idk, I see the appeal!

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Comment by hsoc 3 days ago

I downloaded it today. Pretty cool

Comment by kingkemol888 3 days ago

Great,maybe a Great Work!

Comment by heliskyr2 19 hours ago

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Comment by Studui81Labs 2 days ago

[flagged]

Comment by dthcst 3 days ago

Same reason here: I got tired of my stuff living on someone else's server, so I ended up building my own local memory thing. Not a developer at all, just stubborn.

Two honest questions, since you built it for yourself first:

1. Are the entries plain files I can open and read without your app, or a database? For me that ended up being the whole point. If I can't read it without you, it's not really mine.

2. You say everything is on device, but inference goes to a zero-retention endpoint. Have you looked at running a small local model for the AI part? "Private" and "my text leaves the machine" are hard to hold together in one sentence.

Not a criticism, I hit the same wall myself. Nice project.

Comment by arisAlexis 3 days ago

1) the app is using a database stored on your phone. you can export it all in json or llm format. the one is for export/import and the other to feed an LLM with your data to chat more

2) yes I tried it and it becomes so slow it's unworkable right now but in a future version totally possible. Gemma 4 needs an iphone 17 pro or similar to run in a normal timeframe and still it's slow and also the whisper-large is also very slow. it would also need to download some gigs of data. but that was actually the first version I built :)

Comment by outoftheweed 3 days ago

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