Shortcut-friendly voice memo app?

Shortcuts
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1

I have a use case that requires me to play back a pre-recorded voice memo on command.

I have I have purchased a few different voice memo apps … But can’t find an action to allow this.

Has anyone solve this problem? Thanks.

2

I use Audacity regularly for voice dictation and have been able to create shortcuts to control most of its features via Keyboard Maestro. Audacity is free and has been around for two decades.

3

Note the iOS tag. Your answer is Mac only.

4

Thanks for the response.

Is this an iOS need, not Mac.

My goal is to find a iOS Shortcuts action that will playback a recorded voice memo (or audio file) on command.

5

Why not just stick the audio file in your Music library and use the native app?

6

You could just build a solution in native Shortcuts. Here’s a basic outline

After creating a folder called Memos in the Shortcuts folder in iCloud:

  1. Record Memo.
    • Records audio in Shortcuts and saves to a file in the Memos folder.
    • File name is a timestamp for uniqueness and ease of identification of when it was recorded.
  2. Play Last Memo.
    • Loads a list of all recordings from the Memos folder.
    • Choose one from the list of recordings.
    • The audio file is played back in Shortcuts.
  3. Select and Play Memo.
    • Loads a list of all recordings from the Memos folder and automatically picks the most recent.
    • The most recent audio file is played back in Shortcuts.

Additional enhancements could be made to delete specific audio files, archive files older than a month, create the Memos folder if it doesn’t exist, more gracefully handle a lack of audio files to play, etc. The above are really just to illustrate the principle.

3 Likes
7

Wow, that’s perfect and is exactly what I tried to do.

I wasted lots of time looking for a specfic Voice Memo action when the generic “Play Sound” is a better fit. Thank you.

8

My google skills have failed me…

Was there a change to the GET FILE action that broke the shortcut above?

Specifically, @sylumer’s " Select and Play Memo no longer works.

9

Oops.

I now see there is a GET CONTENTS OF FOLDER action that reproduces this functionality.

Hope this helps dummies like me.