What happens after you let go of the button

Press and hold, say what happened, let go. That's the entire interface, and it's deliberately the only part most people will ever have to think about. Underneath it sits a fair amount of machinery, and we'd rather write down how that machinery works than ask anybody to take “the AI sorts it” on faith.

Recording comes before everything

The recording is written to the phone first, before any attempt to send it anywhere. A plant room with no signal, a rural roof, a dead cell in the middle of a market town: none of it matters at the moment of pressing, because the audio is already safe on the device and the sending can wait until the phone has something to send over. When the connection returns, it catches up on its own without being asked.

The app is also honest about being online. Instead of repeating the operating system's opinion, it checks that it can genuinely reach our server, quickly, and then tells you plainly whether it can and whether your captures have synchronised. That costs a little battery and buys you the ability to believe what the screen says, which on a British job site is worth the trade.

Then the words get written down and read properly

A fast transcription runs on the phone so there's something to look at straight away, and a better model has another go at the same audio once there's a connection, because on-device transcription still makes a mess of trade words, product codes and surnames. The original recording is kept either way. Nothing gets thrown away because a machine had a first attempt at it.

From the words, it works out the things a business actually needs to know: who this concerns, what was agreed, where you were standing, when it happened and how much money is involved. "Need more two-point-five twin and earth for number twelve" becomes a materials line against the right job. A price named to a customer over a fence becomes something that can be checked later against what eventually appears on the invoice.

Sitting underneath your own firm's knowledge there's a layer of ordinary trade knowledge, built from the manuals and standards the work is governed by. It means a question like “ten amps over fifty metres, part of it under a kitchen floor, what cable do I need” can be answered from the van. Where that knowledge is thin, new or contested, it gets flagged for a person to verify rather than confidently guessed at.

The memory is yours, and it is readable

What the system learns goes into plain files. A person can open them, read them and correct them, and every fact in them carries a note of where it came from, named clearly enough that you can go back to the recording it was taken from and hear it for yourself. If we cannot say why the system believes something, the system has no business believing it.

Nothing is treated as true until it has been confirmed. A fact heard once sits there marked as unverified until you say otherwise or something else backs it up. That matters most when the fact is a price: an unconfirmed number is a prompt to check, and it never quietly becomes the basis of an invoice on its own. The whole lot belongs to you, and you can take a copy of it away with you.

If we cannot say why it believes something, it has no business believing it.

From that memory, it makes suggestions

The back end wakes up on its own, checks the clock and the calendar, and reads what it knows for anything falling due. The VAT quarter coming round. The subcontractor payment run on Friday. The end-of-month invoicing. The job finished three weeks ago with nothing sent out for it. It also does the smaller and more valuable thing: while you're stood at the merchant counter, reminding you that the extra sockets you agreed on Tuesday are still missing from the draft invoice.

Those are suggestions and nothing else. Each one arrives as something to approve, ignore or correct. No invoice leaves, no message sends and no money moves without a person tapping yes. We're building this on our own firm's jobs, and we wouldn't accept anything looser than that on our own accounts.

It earns its permissions like an apprentice

A new apprentice gets checked on everything, turns out to be right, and gradually gets left to it. The same principle applies here. Something that has drafted forty invoice lines correctly under your eye has fairly earned the right to draft the forty-first without being asked twice. It hasn't earned the right to send it. Trust is widened deliberately, in daylight, by being checked and being right, and it can be narrowed again just as easily. The full version of that argument — the exam, the ladder and who hands out the stripes — is written up separately.

Over all of it sits one habit we keep having to remind ourselves of: get out of the way. If you ask for an invoice and half the details are missing, it makes the best invoice it can from what you gave it and shows you the result, rather than stopping to demand a registration number you haven't got on you. Rough and immediately useful beats complete and unused.

• It can never fail to record.
• Every fact points back to the recording it came from.
• Unconfirmed stays unconfirmed until somebody checks it.
• A person approves anything that leaves the firm.
• Money never moves on its own.

That's the whole design. Press and hold, and the back office quietly gets done by something that never forgets a conversation and never sends a thing without your say-so.

The first entry in the record, the work that never reaches the invoice, is the long version of the problem all of this exists to solve. The worst place to keep a business is about what the same problem costs the person carrying it.

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