An idea turns up on the bus, in a queue, halfway down the street. By the time you pull out your phone, open a notes app and wait for it to load, the idea is gone.

ReferentCrab: two taps and you're dictating. Speech becomes text right on the screen, with no waiting and no conversion step. The note is created and saved on its own.

Two taps, one hand
Tap the icon, tap the big red microphone button, talk. The app is light and opens instantly, so the thought makes it into text before it slips away.

Punctuation by voice
Say "period" and the crab puts in a period. Say "comma" and it puts in a comma. The text comes out ready to publish.

Nothing to save
No creating a note, no naming it, no tapping Done. It all happens by itself. The first line shows right on the card, so you never have to replay anything to remember what it was about.

It won't cut you off mid-sentence
Voice keyboards love to shut down in the middle of a phrase. Here you set the pause length that stops recording, yourself, in settings. Think out loud for as long as you need.

Edit by voice, not by finger
Need to add to a note you've already made? Put the cursor where you want it and keep dictating. Speech to text works for edits, not just for new text.

Two speech recognition languages at once
A primary one for the text, a secondary one for quotes and insertions. Switch languages right on the main screen.
Send it in two taps, in the format you need

* Plain text — for posts on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X and for notes
* HTML — for properly formatted Telegram posts and for email
* Markdown — for Notion, Obsidian and AI prompts
Markdown and HTML come with a handy formatting bar.

A fast way into your big notes system
Obsidian and Notion don't load instantly, and creating an entry in them takes time too. It's faster to dictate here and forward it there in two taps.

Audio doesn't pile up on your device
Recordings aren't stored and don't clog up your storage. Only the text stays — which is what you actually needed.

Your notes stay yours
Everything is kept on your device only. No cloud.

No subscription
AI-based speech to text apps recognize speech well, but AI burns tokens, and that's where the subscription comes from. ReferentCrab doesn't burn tokens, so there's no subscription. All features are open for the first 10 days. After that it's a one-time purchase of $4.99.

Who made this
There are two of us. Vadim is a writer, a poet and a software developer. His wife Angela is an interface designer. We write a lot, ideas reach us at the least convenient moments, and we built the app we were missing ourselves.
Install ReferentCrab and dictate your first note. It really is that convenient!