Dictation Station: Memoirs

Dictation Station is a voice recorder for telling your life story, built for someone who can barely see a screen. The book is a numbered list of short spoken stories. The storyteller sees four giant color blocks, one huge number, and the story's title — everything else is spoken aloud. Tap the green block, talk, tap to stop. The app writes the story down, and the storyteller can hear it back, keep it, or redo it before it goes in the book. Made for recording memoirs and family history when small text and fiddly controls are not an option: - Giant full-screen buttons, one screen at a time, high contrast, portrait only - Every story is read back in a natural voice before it is kept, and can be read back any time afterwards - A story can be corrected out loud — say what to change and the app changes it, marks the changed words, and can undo it - Stories can be added before or after any story, found by describing them out loud, and moved by saying where they go - Nothing the storyteller does can destroy a recording — thrown-away stories go to a recoverable trash, every earlier take of a story is kept, and a story interrupted by a crash is rebuilt - Works offline: recordings are saved immediately and written down when the connection returns - Stories sync between the storyteller's own devices through iCloud, the whole book can be saved out as a text or Markdown file, and a family can add a second copy in storage they own - A settings area for a family member handles the one-time setup, and can add stories from audio recordings or from files written on a computer (Word documents, plain text, and similar) Setup is done by a family member and takes a few minutes. The app uses OpenAI's transcription and voice services, so setup includes pasting in an OpenAI API key (from platform.openai.com — pay-as-you-go, typically a few cents per hour of recording). The storyteller never sees any of this; their side of the app is just the book and the buttons.