How ThinkAloud works
What it is
ThinkAloud is a note-taking app for people who think faster than they type. You talk — about an idea, a meeting, a recipe, a show you're watching — and the app turns it into a clean, organized Markdown note: a real title, topic tags, headings and bullets where they belong, checklists for the action items.
The unusual part is where that happens. The language model that does the writing runs on your own device's processor. Nothing you record is uploaded anywhere. Take the device offline and every feature on this page still works.
Capturing a thought
From the home screen you pick a note style — Journal, Meeting, Idea, Reference, or a template you wrote yourself — then hit the mic and talk naturally, "um"s and false starts included. You can also snap a photo (a whiteboard, a document, a slide) or type a quick line of text. The screen stays awake for the whole take, and the mic button becomes a stop button while you record — tap it and you can play the recording back before deciding: turn it into a note, or discard it. Nothing is processed until you say so.
The model hears the audio directly — it isn't a transcription bolted onto a chatbot — so it keeps names, numbers, and dates while dropping the disfluencies. A second polish pass tidies the structure. You preview the note, edit it if you like, and save. If what you said overlaps a note you already have, ThinkAloud notices and offers to extend the existing note instead of creating a near-duplicate.
Long recordings
An hour-long lecture doesn't fit through a phone-sized model in one pass, so ThinkAloud processes it the way a person would: it listens in overlapping segments, keeps a running understanding of the whole talk, and at the end writes one note in your selected style covering everything — followed by a timestamped transcript and the original audio, embedded and playable. On Android, processing keeps running in the background with a progress notification — you can use other apps while it works. On iOS the screen stays awake while ThinkAloud finishes in the foreground. Either way, you're notified the moment the note is ready.
Notes that organize themselves
Every saved note is plain Markdown with YAML frontmatter, stored in a folder called a vault — the same format Obsidian uses. You can point ThinkAloud at an existing Obsidian vault, pick any folder you like, or let the app manage its own. There is no database to export from; your notes are already files.
When a capture lands, the app searches your vault for related notes and adds
a ## Related section of [[wikilinks]] — exact titles it
verified, never links the model invented. Those links are what the
knowledge graph draws: capture by capture, your notes wire
themselves into a map of what you've been thinking about.
Asking your own notes
The AI Chat tab answers questions from your vault: "what did we decide about the rollout?", "where did I write down that sandwich recipe?". Retrieval finds the most relevant notes, the model answers from those excerpts only, and every grounded answer shows a Sources row — tap a chip and the note it came from opens. Follow-up questions work, voice questions work, and a deeper Think mode expands the search for harder questions.
What "on-device" actually means
On first run, ThinkAloud downloads Google's Gemma 4 E2B model (about 3 GB) from Hugging Face and stores it locally — that download is the only large transfer the app ever makes. From then on, transcription, writing, tagging, search, and chat all run via LiteRT-LM on your device's GPU (or NPU on supported devices). A model picker in Settings shows alternative models your specific device can run.
Sync, if you want it
Sync is off by default. If you turn it on, your vault syncs to your own Google Drive (a private app folder) or iCloud — authenticated by you, on your account. ThinkAloud has no servers of its own, so there is no middleman to trust: the developer cannot read your notes even in principle. The same vault can be shared between your phone and the desktop app.
What it costs you
No subscription and no account — there's nothing to sign up for. The model is free; the app does the work with hardware you already own.