The shipped product: your agent keeps your diary, then remembers your life and reflects it back, fully local and private. These are directions we are exploring next.
Always-on voice recorders (Limitless, Bee, Plaud, Friend) are normalizing the idea of a device that listens to your day and journals it for you. They are closed and cloud-based. Dear Agent can be the open, local-first sink for that:
- Day one, no hardware needed: any existing source that produces a transcript — phone voice memos, a meeting transcript, an existing pendant, a Whisper run — can be piped into Dear Agent via
add_entry/add_voice_note, and the agent distills it into the day's entry. - Phone companion (later): a lightweight mobile shortcut or app (iOS Shortcut / Android, then a small APK) that streams audio or on-device transcripts to the user's agent, which files the day automatically.
- Always-on mic (much later, hard): continuous capture with on-device transcription, battery/consent/storage handled. This is the regulated, expensive part — deliberately last.
- The wedge is privacy: unlike the cloud recorders, ambient capture in Dear Agent stays on the user's device. The audio of your life never leaves your machine. That is the whole point.
- Structured life graph (optional): light entities (people, places, projects) the agent can query, without becoming a heavyweight memory graph.
- Decision counsel: "the last two times you faced this, here is what you chose and how it felt" — surfaced at decision moments from
recall. - Encryption at rest for the diary directory, opt-in.
- Export / portability (single-file bundle) so a user can move their whole life-log between machines.
Notes captured 2026-06-29.