Most voice-note apps are a microphone in front of somebody’s server. You speak, the audio goes to the cloud, a transcript comes back, and somewhere a privacy policy describes what else happens to it. Murmur is the other design: the whole pipeline — listening, transcribing, tidying, answering — runs on the iPhone, and it works with the radio off.
Tap, talk, done
One button. You press it, say what’s on your mind in whatever order it comes out, and let go. A few seconds later Murmur has written a note with a title, a couple of tags and the content cleaned up into sentences and bullet points — the rambling removed, the meaning kept.
The transcript appears live while you talk, so you can see it is keeping up.
Notes that organise themselves
Every recording becomes a Markdown note with front matter: title, date, tags. The list is searchable and the tags come from what you said, not from a form you had to fill in afterwards.
Say “remind me to renew the passport on Thursday” and Murmur sets a local notification for Thursday. It picks the reminder out of the transcript; you don’t switch modes.
Ask your notes
The part I use most. Type or say a question — “what did I decide about the kitchen quote?”, “when did I last mention the dentist?” — and the on-device model answers from your notes, quoting the note it found it in. It only knows what you’ve told it, which is the point.
How it stays on-device
Speech recognition is WhisperKit, a CoreML port of OpenAI’s Whisper that runs on the Neural Engine. The note-writing and question-answering model is a 0.6-billion-parameter Qwen3 running through Apple’s MLX framework. Both stay resident in memory on a modern iPhone, so a typical note takes about seven seconds end to end: three to transcribe, four to write. The first launch downloads the models and compiles them, which is the only time Murmur needs a connection.
Your notes are files
Markdown with YAML front matter, exported with one tap. They open in Obsidian, iA Writer, VS Code or anything that reads text. There’s no proprietary format to escape from later.
Widget
A home-screen widget with two buttons: record, and ask. It’s the fastest path from “I need to remember this” to a note that exists.
Free and Pro
Free gets you recording, transcription, note writing and search. Murmur Pro is a one-time purchase (no subscription) that unlocks unlimited Ask, the most accurate voice model, reminders, export and unlimited recording length.
