I use Samsung Voice Recorder to avoid this app’s premium plan

I can’t be alone in wishing I’d kept a journal over the years. I’d love to reflect on what I was up to on certain days 20 years ago and how I was processing it all. Other than a few batches of photos and my increasingly fading memory, the records of my various travel adventures have mostly been lost. And those were the exciting times — the humdrum days in between have been almost entirely condemned to the mists of time.

I don’t beat myself up about not keeping a journal because I know I wouldn’t have stuck with it. Having to sit down and write or type for 15 minutes in the evening would have fallen by the wayside pretty quickly. But recent advances in AI have made me rethink this. Now, belatedly, I’m journaling every day. It takes around two minutes before bed each night to do it via Samsung Voice Recorder, and I even realized I can use it to avoid the premium plan on one of the best journaling apps.

After upgrading to the Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus last year, I started playing around with the new Galaxy AI features. The AI transcription in Samsung Voice Recorder inspired me to use it for journaling. I’m aware that some Android phones have had live transcription features for a while, but I was particularly impressed with how quickly and easily Voice Recorder can both transcribe the voice notes after the fact and use AI to tidy them up.

This got me 90% of the way towards the plan of a quick brain dump each evening, but I was also wary of leaving the transcribed notes scattered about in an unordered fashion. You can arrange them in categories in both Voice Recorder and Samsung Notes, but what I really wanted was an organized journal setup in which I just dictate an entry, and it labels and stores it in an easy-to-reference way later. The simplest option was to use a journaling app with AI transcription baked in.

The Day One app fit the bill almost perfectly. It’s a polished journaling app popular on both iOS and Android that lets you log text, photos, and audio entries, plus it can sync across devices. The only snag was that, while the app has a free tier to record entries, you have to pay for the premium plan if you want to use the transcription feature. That left me with two imperfect solutions I could combine to meet my needs.

Now, each evening, I do the following.

1. Open Voice Recorder and hit Record, then talk about my day for a minute or two.
2. Stop the recording and save it, then tap on it and press Transcribe. A recording of that length takes around ten seconds to process.
3. Tap and hold the text and select Copy all.
4. Three taps to exit Voice Recorder, open the Day One app, and press New entry.
5. Paste the text, and I’m done.

The whole process takes two to three minutes. Admittedly, the Galaxy AI transcriptions aren’t always perfect as I’m usually tiredly rambling into the phone. This isn’t an issue for me as I’m not planning to publish my memoirs. I just want enough to jog my memory, and it’s more than adequate for that purpose.

For the record, I’m not against paying for premium plans on apps if they’re offering a genuine benefit — Duolingo is one example of an app that has certainly done well out of me financially. Day One is a great app, and I’d urge anyone who can benefit from the premium tier to sign up if it fits your budget.

In my case, I’m just minimally using the app while getting the one premium tier feature I need for free on my device. Almost all of the many premium perks would go unused if I signed up. At over $40 per year, I find that expense hard to justify. But I’ll let you judge my actions in the poll below.

This setup might not work for everyone, but it’s been a game-changer for me. I’ve finally found a low-effort way to keep track of my days, and it’s made me weirdly excited to look back at them someday. If AI is going to take over our lives anyway, it might as well help us remember the good old days when it was just a novelty.