Sovox

A local voice recorder for meetings, for iOS 26.

It records in the background, transcribes on device, hands the transcript to your own ChatGPT or Claude app through a Shortcut you build once, and opens a prefilled Outlook draft. You press Send.

Nothing leaves the phone except through that hand off, which you trigger. There is no networking code in the app at all: no URLSession, no analytics, no crash reporting, no SDKs, no package dependencies. App Transport Security is configured to refuse every outbound connection. No EventKit, no Contacts, no App Groups, no push.

What it does

• Records through interruptions. AVAudioEngine with a tap, gapless segment rollover, and recovery from phone calls, Bluetooth route changes and media services resets. Survives backgrounding, a locked screen and three hour meetings.
• Transcribes while it records. A long lived serial actor at .utility transcribes each segment as it closes, with a thermal guard that defers transcription and never recording.
• Live Activity. Elapsed time on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island, with Pause and Stop that work without unlocking.
• Hands off to your AI app. A file in, file out bridge through Shortcuts. The app never talks to any model directly.
• Ask. Question several transcripts at once, with every claim attributed to its source recording.
• To-dos. Proposed from transcripts, applied only after you approve each one.

Requirements

Xcode 26, iOS 26. Zero dependencies, so there is nothing to install.

Building it

1. Open Sovox.xcodeproj
2. Set your team on the Sovox and SovoxWidget targets under Signing and Capabilities
3. Change both bundle identifiers to your own. The widget must be the app identifier plus exactly one suffix
4. Run

./verify.sh runs the source level checks: parse, plists, project integrity, and the invariants that cannot be expressed as unit tests.

Design notes

Three constraints shaped most of this:

The audio thread always wins. Transcription is compute over a closed file and must never contend with a real time capture path, so it is strictly serial, runs at .utility, and backs off when the device gets warm.

A silent failure is worse than a loud one. Every transcription error is captured, persisted with its segment and shown with a reason. Stitching inserts [segment N could not be transcribed] rather than quietly returning a shorter transcript. The Ask tab refuses above 100,000 characters instead of letting the model truncate and answer confidently from a partial context.

Free user text is untrusted. Custom actions are the only place it enters the prompt. It is sanitised on save, wrapped in markers, and followed by a precedence paragraph. Nine adversarial cases are unit tested against the assembled prompt, and a debug only harness runs four of them through the real bridge.

Layout

Sovox/            app target
SovoxShared/      compiled into both the app and the widget
SovoxWidget/      Live Activity, Dynamic Island, Control Centre control
SovoxTests/       209 tests

See AUDIT.md for the self audit and the list of APIs that are not compiler verified, RELEASES.md for version history, and TESTFLIGHT.md for distribution.

Licence

No licence granted. All rights reserved.