I built NoteChirp because I forget things. That's the whole origin story, and it's not a more interesting one than that. I'll think of a task, or half of one, and by the time I've put my phone down it's gone. A bit of ADHD, if you want the clinical shorthand for it, but mostly it's just how my brain works, and I got tired of losing good ideas to it.

So I built an app that listens. You hold a button, you say the thing, it becomes a task. That was the pitch for a long time. Simple, useful, done.

Then last week I tested the shopping list feature the way I actually shop, which is to say badly, at 6pm, thinking about what to cook rather than what to buy, and it did something I wasn't expecting.

What I actually said

I held the button and said this, no more carefully than I'd say it to a person standing next to me:

"Need: tortillas, ground beef, cheese, salsa, and limes. For dinner tonight."

Five things. A weeknight taco run. The kind of list I'd normally type into Notes with my thumb while standing in the cereal aisle, already knowing I'd forgotten something.

What came back

NoteChirp handed me a shopping list with fourteen items on it, split cleanly by supermarket aisle. Items I said are listed normally; the seven it added on its own are highlighted in blue.

Produce
  • 2 limes
  • 1 small white onion
  • 1 small bunch fresh cilantro
  • 1 medium jalapeño
  • 1 medium avocado
  • 1 small head iceberg lettuce
  • 2 medium Roma tomatoes
Meat & Seafood
  • 250g ground beef, 80/20 fat ratio
Dairy & Eggs
  • 100g shredded Mexican blend or cheddar
  • 100ml sour cream
Bread & Bakery
  • 8 small corn or flour tortillas
Pantry & Dry Goods
  • 1 jar salsa (approx. 300ml)

I said five things. Seven of the fourteen items on that list never left my mouth: the onion, the cilantro, the jalapeño, the avocado, the lettuce, the tomatoes, the sour cream. NoteChirp heard tortillas, ground beef, cheese, salsa, and limes, for dinner tonight, worked out that meant tacos, and quietly filled in everything a taco dinner actually needs.

It also picked a fat ratio for the beef I didn't ask for. 80/20 is what you want for tacos: enough fat to stay juicy, not so much it swims in the pan. I didn't specify that. I don't think I've ever specified that out loud in my life. It just knew, the way a person who cooks a lot of tacos would know.

Why this is the feature, not a feature

I'd been describing NoteChirp's shopping list tool as "say your grocery list, get a grocery list." That's accurate. It's also underselling it by a wide margin.

What actually happened here is closer to: say what you're making, get the shop. You don't need a complete list in your head before you speak. You need the meal in your head, and the app reverse-engineers the ingredients from there. That's a different, harder, more useful thing than transcribing a list. A voice memo can transcribe five items. It has no idea those five items are tacos, and it has no way to notice you're missing the other seven.

That's the gap NoteChirp is built to close. Not type faster with your voice. Think out loud about dinner, and don't have to think about the shopping.

The part that's still true about how I lose things

I want to be honest about why I noticed this, because it's the same reason I built the app in the first place. If I'd sat down and made a proper shopping list for taco night, I guarantee I'd have forgotten the cilantro. Possibly the limes, which is a genuinely embarrassing thing to forget for tacos. Not because I don't know tacos need limes, but because by the time I'm standing in a shop with a half-formed list, the thought that mattered twenty minutes ago has already been replaced by three new ones.

That's the forgetting I built this for. Not forgetting that tacos exist. Forgetting the seventh thing on a list I never finished making, because my attention had already moved on to something else before I finished the sentence.

NoteChirp doesn't fix that about me. I still lose thoughts constantly. What it does is catch the ones I do manage to say out loud, before they turn into a voice note that sits in WhatsApp unopened for three weeks. And in this case, it caught six or seven things I didn't even think to say.

Try it on your own dinner

Next time you're planning something to cook, don't write the list. Just say the meal — what you're making and who it's for — and see what NoteChirp hands back. If you're making something with more than five ingredients in your head, I'd genuinely like to know if it gets close. Find me on X at @notechirpapp.

NoteChirp is free on iOS and Android. No account, nothing leaves your phone.