Audio tray app
Built July 2026. Back on Wispr Flow as of October 2026.
I hold two keys, talk, let go, and cleaned-up text appears wherever my cursor is. It is a small tray app I had built to replace two subscriptions, one for dictation and one for meeting notes. It also records meetings and saves structured notes (summary, decisions, action items, open questions) straight into my notes folder.
- Why
- I was paying for one tool to type what I say and another to take meeting notes. I wanted the audio to stay on my machine, with only the text going to an AI for cleanup.
- How long
- Two days in July 2026.
How I built it
- I asked Claude Code for a tray app with one hotkey: hold to record, release to paste.
- I had it transcribe on my own computer with a free speech model.
- I had it send only the text to a small, cheap AI model for cleanup.
- I had it paste through the clipboard and put my old clipboard back a moment later.
- I added meeting mode: record my mic and the computer's sound together, then save notes into my vault.
- I added a backup hotkey for meetings after the tray menu froze mid-meeting.
- To copy it you need
- Claude, or the AI of your choice, a Windows PC and an AI API key. The gotcha: tell the cleanup step very firmly that what it receives is dictation to tidy, never a request to answer.
Try it yourself
Copy this prompt and paste it into ChatGPT or Claude to try it yourself.
I want to copy the audio tray app from Frances Tang's What Are We Building profile. It is a small app in her system tray: she holds a hotkey, talks, lets go, and tidied text is pasted where her cursor is. Speech becomes text on her own computer, and only the text goes to an AI to fix punctuation and filler words. Her gotcha: she once dictated a sentence starting "give me a prompt" and the AI answered it instead of cleaning it up, so the cleanup instruction has to say the input is dictation, never a request. Help me build a starter version for my computer with just the dictation part. Start by asking whether I'm on Windows or Mac and whether I have an AI API key. Ask me for anything you need.
Tools I used for this project
