I take notes by typing. The problem is that typing is slow and breaks flow when I am in the middle of thinking through something. I wanted a faster way to capture a thought without leaving the browser.
Voice notes turned out to be that faster way.
What Voice Notes and Audio Recorder does
Adds a voice recorder to Firefox. Click the extension icon, record, stop. The audio is saved. Download it as an MP3 when you need it.
That is the entire interface. No transcription step, no cloud processing, no account.
The key design decision: local only
Most voice recorder tools send your audio to a server for processing. Sometimes that is necessary — if you want transcription, you need a speech recognition engine. Those are expensive to run and require infrastructure.
Voice Notes does not transcribe. It records locally, stores locally, downloads locally. Your audio never leaves Firefox. This is a limitation if you wanted searchable text, but it is a feature if you care about what you are saying staying private.
Who this is for
Developers who want to quickly capture a thought during a debugging session without switching apps. Writers who prefer to brainstorm by speaking. Anyone who takes meeting notes and wants a quick record of what was said.
The use case is "capture something quickly." For long-form transcribed notes, there are dedicated tools with cloud backends. For quick voice capture in the browser, this is the simplest option.
Technical notes
The extension uses the Web Audio API and MediaRecorder API, which are standard Firefox APIs. No native code, no special permissions beyond microphone access. The MP3 encoding happens in the browser using JavaScript.
Install it
Voice Notes and Audio Recorder — Firefox Add-ons
Free. No account. Works in Firefox.
This is one of 11 Firefox extensions I built — all free, no-account, no-server. See the full series for the others.
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