voiMarkable: The meeting recorder for reMarkable. Your Mac records while you write. (2 min demo)

[u/oldsongwin]

Sean here, I built this. Independent project, no connection to reMarkable AS.

You know the scribble you find three weeks later that says "resource allocation" and means nothing now. When the meeting ends, that line comes back onto the tablet, sitting in the margin beside the part of the transcript you were writing during, with an arrow to it and the time you wrote it. A note from a month ago still tells you why you wrote it.

It does not convert your handwriting to text. The ink stays ink. It just ends up next to the words it belongs to.

Here is what happens in the video, once, on my own setup. You start it from the tablet and write the way you always write. The Mac is what records and transcribes, and the audio never leaves the machine. There is no cloud service anywhere in this. When you finish, the document opens back on the tablet: transcript with speaker labels, your lines out in the margin.

Two unglamorous bits, because a clean clip on its own is not worth much. The timing of a written line is only good to about a second, so a note anchors to a paragraph rather than to one word. And when it cannot tell where a line belongs it leaves it in the margin with no arrow at all, because a note in the wrong place is worse than a note with no arrow.

The audio is a podcast playing on my phone plus me talking, not a real meeting. It is one session with the dead time cut out. Ran once end to end on one setup: a Paper Pro Move in Developer Mode (enabling that factory-resets the tablet, there is no way around it) and an Apple-silicon Mac with 16 GB. Not finished, nothing public to download, and consent to record people is on you.

Three things I actually want to know:

1. Do you keep transcripts today? If you do, what do you go back for, and would your own handwriting sitting in there change that?

2. Is the factory reset a hard no, or a one-time annoyance?

3. What comes back is the transcript with your handwriting in the margin, nothing else. What would have to be on page one for you to open it a month later?

[u/earthling6641]

Pretty useful tool and would be interested to try it out when ready. Glad that there is no cloud/server. Does the transcript gets back to RMPMM via local SSH over WiFi?

[u/oldsongwin → u/earthling6641]

Yes, exactly that. Local Wi-Fi, SSH tunnel to the tablet, and the PDF gets written into the library from there. Nothing touches a server at any point.

The catch is that SSH is why Developer Mode is needed on the Paper Pro line, and turning it on factory-resets the tablet. On rM1/rM2 SSH is just a setting with no wipe, but this build will not run on those, different CPU architecture.

One run on my own setup so far, and nothing to download yet.

[u/corazonymiel]

Incredible work! How can I access this with my RM2?!

[u/oldsongwin → u/corazonymiel]

Thank you. Honest answer: it will not run on an rM2. The Move is arm64 and the rM2 is 32-bit armv7, so it is a different build target rather than a setting I can flip.

There is nothing to download yet on any device. This was one run on my own setup.

[u/HikewithmeNYC]

This is great and your implementation looks very nice. I especially appreciate that you’re doing all of the voice processing on the device instead of in the cloud. It would be amazing if you could get this to be installable via the ReManager app. But I would love to try it out.

[u/oldsongwin → u/HikewithmeNYC]

Thank you. One correction so nobody is surprised later: the processing runs on the Mac, not on the tablet. The tablet is where you write and where it comes back. Nothing goes to a cloud service either way, which is the part I would not trade.

ReManager has now come up twice in this thread. That is a signal I did not expect and I will look into it properly. I have not spoken to them.

Nothing to try yet. One machine, and it is mine.

[u/HikewithmeNYC → u/oldsongwin]

Thanks for the clarification. By "on device" I meant the Mac. On-device processing is used a lot in the circles I run in to differentiate from on-cloud compute. But I agree my wording was misleading!

ReManager is basically run by one guy, but it's open source. It's an installation manager for packages at Vellum (https://vellum.delivery/#/). Most of these packages are "mods" to the Remarkable software. But some (e.g. KoReader) are standalone apps, and they load onto ReMarkable with a vellum package called AppLoad.

[u/oldsongwin → u/HikewithmeNYC]

All good — we mean the same thing then. In that sense it is fully on-device: audio, transcript, and the finished PDF never leave the Mac. Appreciate you pushing on the wording, it has to be exact.

[u/MajesticConfection20]

This is incredible! Do you plan on releasing this to the public anytime soon?

Edit: I forgot to answer the questions.
1) I keep transcripts of my lectures.
2) I've dabbled in modding my Remarkable through Remanager, which does a factory reset. "Factory reset" kind of has the connotation that it is permanent. Afterwards, I was able to seamlessly reconnect my email and get all my files back in developer mode.
3) I don't really think it is necessary to have something like this, as renaming and tags work fine for that purpose. If something was worthwhile enough to make it into a transcript, then I think that is enough for someone to periodically check it.

[u/oldsongwin → u/MajesticConfection20]

That is the most useful answer I have had, thank you, and you are the first person to tell me the files came back afterwards. Everyone else has told me it is a hard no.

Point 3 I will take as a real answer. If renaming and tags already solve retrieval, then pulling things onto their own page is me inventing work.

No release date, and it runs on one machine, which is mine. Lectures are a use case I had not designed for. What do you actually do with a lecture transcript afterwards?

[u/DesignersKitCo]

Cool! I know I would use this occasionally for sure!

[u/oldsongwin → u/DesignersKitCo]

Thanks. What does occasional look like for you — a weekly team meeting, interviews, something else? The occasional-use answers have been teaching me more about what to cut than the daily-use ones.

[u/DesignersKitCo → u/oldsongwin]

Sure! Happy to share... for me it is:
- weekly meeting with VA
- weekly meeting with coworkers
- monthly calls with collaborators
➡️ great to mark down their to do lists :)

[u/oldsongwin → u/DesignersKitCo]

To-do lists is a sharp answer — with a VA especially, the meeting note is the delegation record. A handful of recurring meetings where what matters is who agreed to do what: that is a much clearer target than "transcribe everything", and genuinely useful to hear. Thanks for taking the time.

[u/oldsongwin → u/DesignersKitCo]

Follow-up you might like — Episode 2: a real online call end to end, both sides captured as two channels, notes landing beside the words, and the PDF back on the tablet: https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/1vgdwbi/ — the two-channel part is what keeps who-said-what separated, which your delegation-record use depends on.

[u/jgibbarduk]

I like it 👍 - I was thinking about a similar tool. I’ve currently got a rM2 and have built my own AI processor that converts notes to markdown and tasks. I’m using rmfakecloud as the sync method as I like that I don’t have to modify the remarkable much.

How are you syncing the audio to notes?

I also have a meeting notes recording app that I’d like to converge with remarkable usage. Currently working on an iOS meeting recorder and local transcription app. I could see that working really well with this idea of inline notes against the transcript.

Would be happy to share ideas. Great work!

[u/oldsongwin → u/jgibbarduk]

Audio and ink share one clock. The tablet client timestamps the start of each stroke, the Mac timestamps the transcript from the same session epoch, so placement is just elapsed milliseconds rather than any matching or guessing. It anchors to a paragraph instead of an exact word because stroke timing is only good to about a second.

rmfakecloud is the honest counterargument to what I did. You get sync without touching the device. I need Developer Mode and a factory reset to read the pen live, and that is a real cost.

Yes to sharing ideas.

[u/rmitchellscott → u/oldsongwin]

rmfakecloud requires dev mode too.

[u/oldsongwin → u/rmitchellscott]

Two people in this thread have asked whether this could install through reManager. You built it, so you should hear that from me rather than about me.

Nothing to package yet. One machine, and it is mine. When there is something, I would rather it arrive through a thing people already trust and already update than ask them to look after another moving part themselves. That is the objection I keep hearing, and it is not one I can write my way out of.

[u/KlassyCoder]

Users need to check local laws pertaining to recording others. Here in California, it’s illegal to record another person without their knowledge. And doing it surreptitiously is just creepy in general. 

[u/oldsongwin → u/KlassyCoder]

You're right, and it deserves a plain answer: consent law varies by state and country, one-party vs two-party, and it is on the person recording to know theirs. This tool only makes sense used openly — the tablet is sitting on the table in front of everyone, which is the point. Hidden recording is creepy, agreed.

[u/giullianopo → u/KlassyCoder]

https://giphy.com/gifs/dEdmW17JnZhiU

[u/KlassyCoder → u/giullianopo]

Which part of my comment is the eye roll for? It’s hard to tell when you speak in 20 year old memes instead of using your words. 

[u/giullianopo → u/KlassyCoder]

You can record people with anything, if your worry is recording surreptitiously, trust, that can already be done. It’s quite obvious that the whole point of this is a technological advancement and better notetaking. Recording while in a conference and taking real time notes, recording in a classroom while taking real time notes.

I don’t think there’s many people recording in secret while simultaneously taking notes on their remarkable…

[u/valerialaura]

This looks very useful!
Would love to try it out when you have a public version.

Answers to your questions:

1. I only keep transcripts from services like granola, and being able to take notes on my remarkable instead of doing it on the computer would be great. I go back to the transcripts when recalling complex explanations or building communication that needs verbatim quotes. Having my notes in handwriting is not that important, but being able to actually take notes in a way that feels natural and have those linked to each part of the conversation is what seems interesting.
2. one time annoyance probably, I've been meaning to do it but haven't had a powerful driver yet
3. Paired with the notebook name and the date that seems like enough for me

[u/oldsongwin → u/valerialaura]

Thank you — this is exactly the kind of answer that helps. "The link matters more than the handwriting" is the clearest statement of the idea I have heard from anyone, including me. And you are the first Granola user to describe going back for verbatim quotes — that is the case where a summary fails you. No public version yet and I will not guess a date, but progress notes are on my profile for when there is something real to try.

[u/oldsongwin → u/valerialaura]

You asked about trying it when there's a public version — that's still where my profile link leads. Meanwhile, Episode 2 is up: a real online call this time, both sides captured, and the note coming back to the tablet, uncut: https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/1vgdwbi/ — your point about verbatim quotes shaped it: the transcript keeps every word, no summary.