Press a button.Remember everything.
Pocket Protector is a push-button voice recorder you build yourself. Every recording is transcribed, labeled by speaker, and made searchable on your own Mac. Ask it what was said, and it answers with the exact moment.
From click to answer, on hardware you own.
The device records. Your Mac does the thinking. The two talk over your private Tailscale network, and the audio never goes anywhere else.
1 · Press
An always-on ESP32-C3 reads the button and sends the Pi a 150 ms pulse to start or stop.
2 · Record
The Pi captures 16 kHz mono in one-minute chunks, then rsyncs the finished session to your Mac.
3 · Understand
Whisper transcribes, pyannote labels who spoke, and Ollama embeds it into a local Chroma index.
4 · Ask
llama3.1:8b answers from the six closest excerpts and cites the session and m:ss range.
Built for the conversations you'll want back.
One press to capture
No app, no phone, no wake word. Click to start, click to stop. Triple-click to power on, hold to shut down.
Knows who said what
pyannote splits every session by speaker, so transcripts read like a script: Speaker 1, Speaker 2, and so on.
Search by meaning
Ask in your own words. Answers come only from your recordings, with the session and timestamp to check them against.
Five layers. Off-the-shelf parts.
A tiny always-on controller handles the button and the power. The Pi only runs when you need it, and shuts itself down cleanly before the power is cut.
- Raspberry Pi[PI MODEL]
- ESP32-C3 Super MiniButton + power control
- INMP441 MEMS micI2S audio in
- PowerBoost + battery5V, switched by the ESP32
- Button, 2N2222, 1 kΩThe whole interface
Yours in four steps.
Each step ends with a quick check, so you know it works before you move on.
Your conversations never leave the house.
- Transcription, speaker labels and answers all run on your Mac.
- The Pi hands audio over Tailscale with SSH keys.
- Recordings, transcripts and .env files are git-ignored.
- After one gated model download, it works offline.