{
  "id": 12723916,
  "title": "fieldmemo: keep the phone in your pocket, talk to it, get a field journal at home",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/07/fieldmemo-keep-the-phone-in-your-pocket-talk-to-it-get-a-field",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-10-07T22:06:52.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/darrenmakes/fieldmemo-keep-the-phone-in-your-pocket-talk-to-it-get-a-field-journal-at-home-32bo"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "This project, called fieldmemo, creates a field journal from voice memos recorded during outdoor walks, all without using the internet or a phone screen. To use it, record your thoughts and observations on a walk, then run a single command on the recorded memos and the GPS track from your device. fieldmemo will generate three files: a readable field journal (journal.md), a map layer (walk.geojson) with pins marking your locations, and a CSV file (notes.csv) for each sighting or issue.\n\nThe system uses Whisper for speech-to-text conversion, with some custom training to improve accuracy on countryside-specific terms like bird and mushroom names. It also uses Gemma 4, an open-weight AI model, to interpret the transcripts and create the journal, map, and CSV files. The demo version uses synthetic voice recordings and a made-up GPS track for testing purposes, but the code is designed to work with real-world data as well.",
  "summary": "This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass AI disclosure: I built this with an AI coding agent, which wrote most of the code and the first draft of this post. I read it, watched the demo and approved the text. Everything below about what worked and what broke comes from the build log in the repo, not from memory. What I Built fieldmemo turns the voice…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}