50 free, MIT-licensed templates for spoken notes. Each one tells you exactly what to say into your phone or watch in 30–60 seconds, and gives you the AI prompt that turns the transcript into something usable: meeting action items, a CRM entry, a session recap, study notes, or a first draft.
📖 Read the full pack: https://pittner.github.io/voice-note-templates/
Most people abandon voice notes for the same reason: the transcript comes back as one unpunctuated paragraph that takes longer to read than the thing would have taken to type.
That is not a transcription-quality problem. It is a structure problem — nobody said the fields out loud, so nothing downstream can find them. No summariser, no search, and not you in three weeks.
A template fixes it in the cheapest possible place: the 45 seconds you were already spending.
- State the context first — who, what, when, in the opening sentence. This is the step everyone skips and the one that matters most. A note that starts with context is routable even if you never process it further.
- Speak the template body — 30 to 60 seconds. Longer memos ramble and summarise badly; shorter ones drop the context.
- Run the matching prompt on the transcript — every template ships with the exact prompt for its output format.
| # | Category | Typical output |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Meetings & standups | Decision log, action items, standup update |
| 2 | Sales calls, showings & field visits | CRM entry, objection library, handover note |
| 3 | Client sessions & private practice | Structured session recap, referral note |
| 4 | Legal matter recaps | Matter recap, time entry, deadline capture |
| 5 | Lectures, seminars & study | Recall questions, literature notes, flashcards |
| 6 | Writing & first drafts | Outline, cleaned first draft, revision checklist |
| 7 | Journaling & brain dumps | Sorted brain dump, decision journal, evening review |
| 8 | Travel & multilingual capture | Language-tagged notes, expense rows, field notes |
| 9 | Wrist & hands-free capture | One-breath capture, task line, car-park recap |
| 10 | Leaving a subscription tool | Migration inventory, cost check, requirements list |
Full text of all 50: TEMPLATES.md or the web version.
Say this (category 1, post-meeting decision log):
"Meeting recap. Project Atlas, 12 March, attendees Sam and Priya. Three decisions were made. One: we ship without the import feature, owner Sam, by 20 March. Two: pricing stays as is until Q3, owner Priya, no date. Three: we drop the Android build, owner me, by 15 March. One thing is still open: who owns migration support, and Priya owes us an answer by 14 March."
Then prompt with:
Turn this transcript into two lists: DECISIONS (one line each, no discussion)
and OPEN QUESTIONS (question, who owes the answer, by when). Do not invent
owners or dates. If one is missing, write UNASSIGNED.
Any of them. The templates are plain text on purpose — built-in dictation on iOS, macOS and Android all work, as does any transcription service.
The one property worth deciding deliberately is where the audio goes, because it is the only one you cannot change afterwards:
| Cloud transcription | On-device transcription | |
|---|---|---|
| Works in airplane mode | No | Yes |
| Audio uploaded to a third party | Yes, by design | No — processing is local |
| Minutes cap | Common on free tiers | Bounded by device, not plan |
"On-device" is a technical statement about where processing runs. It is not a legal or compliance claim, and nothing in this pack should be read as one.
These templates were written alongside VoxFlow: free, no account, on-device speech model, 99 languages, works offline. App Store version for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch; VoxFlow Pro for Mac is a separate free, notarized push-to-talk download. You do not need either to use anything here.
PRs welcome, especially for professions the ten categories miss — nurses, surveyors, inspectors, teachers, social workers, veterinarians. See CONTRIBUTING.md. Five templates in the existing format is the right size for a first PR.
MIT — see LICENSE. Copy them, fork them, translate them, ship them inside your own product docs.