Introducing Phonic

Phonic is our first app. It records dictation and meetings on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch, transcribes them on the device, and keeps the files in your own iCloud Drive.

Phonic is our first app. It records dictation and meetings on iPhone, iPad and Mac, with an Apple Watch companion, and turns those recordings into searchable transcripts. Transcription happens on the device, and the recordings are stored in your own iCloud Drive.

Most of our work is consultancy for businesses and charities, so this is a bit different for us. This post covers what Phonic does, who it is for, what is free and what is not, and where to get help.

Who it is for

Phonic is for people who record things on Apple devices and want to find them again later. That covers a few common situations.

Someone dictating notes between appointments wants to speak, stop, and have the text ready when they sit down. Someone on Teams or Zoom calls all day wants a record of what was agreed without taking notes while they talk. Someone running a team meeting in a room wants to know who said what, and what the actions were.

If none of that sounds familiar, Phonic is probably not for you, and that is fine.

What it does

The basics are simple. Record from the microphone, or import an existing audio or video file and Phonic extracts the audio. The recording is transcribed with Apple’s speech models, with timings for every word. During playback the current line and word are highlighted, and tapping a line jumps to that point.

There are two ways to start recording. New Recording opens every option. Quick Record starts straight away from the source you last chose, into the folder you are looking at. The New Recording and Quick Record article explains the difference.

Search covers every transcript and title at once, and each result opens the recording at the moment the words were said. Transcripts can be copied or exported as Text, Markdown or SRT, and the audio can be exported too.

Recordings are written in fragments every few seconds. If the app crashes or the battery runs out mid-recording, you keep everything up to the last fragment.

Free, and Phonic Pro

Phonic is free to download. The free version is not a trial. It includes:

Recording from the microphone, and importing audio or video
On-device transcription with word timings
Playback with line and word highlighting, from 0.5x to 2x
Search across every recording
Folders, and export to Text, Markdown or SRT
iCloud Drive, Apple Watch, widgets and controls

Phonic Pro is a one-off in-app purchase of £2.99. It is not a subscription. Pro adds the features that matter for calls and meetings:

Speaker identification and naming
System audio recording from apps such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom
Meeting mode, which mixes your microphone with the other participants on the call
The Insights tab: a summary, key points, action items with owners, decisions, open questions, topics and talk time per speaker

The Phonic Pro article lists exactly what sits on each side.

A few details on how the Pro features behave, because it is better to know the limits up front.

Speakers start as Person A, Person B and so on. Phonic names them when they introduce themselves or someone addresses them by name, and if the recording is linked to a calendar meeting, it uses the attendee list to help. You can rename speakers yourself, with the attendees offered as suggestions. Recordings up to an hour use a model called Sortformer. Longer recordings rely on clustering alone, which can merge similar voices.

Insights uses Apple Intelligence when it is available on the device, with a built-in fallback when it is not.

To record a call on iPhone or iPad, Meeting mode asks you to share your screen through iOS, and you need to turn the microphone on there. On the Mac, recording other apps needs System Audio Recording permission. Some VoIP apps may restrict capture. The Teams and Zoom article walks through the setup.

The devices it runs on

Phonic runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. It needs iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27 or watchOS 27.

On iPhone, recording can start from widgets, Control Center or the Action button, and a Live Activity shows the time with a Stop button while you record. On iPad, New Recording and Quick Record sit in the toolbar, with the transcript and Insights side by side. On the Mac, Command-R starts Quick Record and Command-period stops it, and Phonic keeps recording from the menu bar if you close the window.

The Apple Watch app records from your wrist. The watch keeps each recording until your iPhone has received it, and the iPhone then imports and transcribes it.

On your device, in your iCloud Drive

Recording and transcription happen on the device. With Phonic Pro, speaker identification happens on the device too. Phonic does not ask you to create an account with us.

Each recording is saved as a .phonic package containing the audio, its metadata, the transcript and, with Pro, the Insights. The packages live in your own iCloud Drive, so you can see them in Files on iPhone and iPad and in Finder on the Mac. If you do not use iCloud, recordings stay in a Phonic Library on the device. Either way, they are files you control, and you can move, export or delete them whenever you like.

There is one trade-off worth knowing about. The first transcription in a language downloads Apple’s speech model for that language. With Pro, the first speaker identification downloads speaker models of about 120 MB. Both are downloaded once and reused afterwards, but it is worth doing this on Wi-Fi before your first long meeting.

For businesses, keeping recordings on your own devices and in your own iCloud account makes the data question simpler. It does not make it go away. Recording people still needs a lawful basis and, in most cases, telling them they are being recorded. The ICO publishes guidance on this. This is general information, not legal advice. The Phonic privacy policy sets out exactly what the app does with your data and which permissions it asks for.

Where to get help

Everything above is covered in more detail on the Phonic page and on the support site. If you are starting out, these four articles are the best place to begin:

The support site also covers Apple Watch, the Mac, iCloud storage and troubleshooting. If something is not working or not covered, that is where to start, and we would rather hear about it than not.