This is a founder's note, so I'll write it plainly. There are plenty of transcription apps, and most of them work fine. The trouble was that every one I tried made the same mistake in the same place, and once you notice it you end up building the thing that's missing. Around the fire is where stories begin. Bonfiyah is where they live. This is the story of why it exists.
The thing that kept going wrong.
It started with a small, repeated annoyance: a conversation would happen, something would be said that mattered, and weeks later it was just gone. Not lost in a dramatic way — lost in the ordinary way, where someone promised a thing, everyone moved on, and the promise dissolved with no one quite to blame. A deadline slips. A number drifts between the conversation and the contract. A detail from the doctor's visit evaporates on the drive home.
So I did what everyone does and started recording things. And that's where the second, more interesting problem showed up. The recordings didn't help. A 25-minute audio file is the wrong shape for the job. You never re-listen to the whole thing — you want to check one fact, find one moment, share one part. The audio just sat there, and the information stayed locked inside it.
The tools that promised to fix that handed me a bullet-list summary. Which was worse, in a way, because it threw away the exact things I needed. Who promised what. By when. The condition attached to it. Whether what someone said today matched what they said last month. The summary kept the gist and deleted the substance — and the substance was the only reason I'd recorded anything in the first place.
The realization that changed the product.
Here's the turn. The thing I actually wanted wasn't a better summary. It was a structured, attributed list of commitments — who said they'd do what, in their own words, anchored to the moment they said it, tracked until it was done. And right behind that: a system that didn't forget who people were between recordings, so it could reason across all my conversations instead of treating each one as an island.
Those two ideas — commitments as the output, and people as the unit of memory — are what Bonfiyah is built on, and they're what make it a different product rather than another transcription app.
Promise Tracker is the first idea made real. People Memory is the second — Bonfiyah recognizes the same person across your whole library by the sound of their voice, so it can carry forward everything it knows about them. Once people persist across recordings, everything good becomes possible: a brief before each meeting, a record that notices when someone's story drifts, a profile that builds itself from the conversations you've already had. None of it works without the foundation. All of it does, once the foundation is there.
The choices we made on purpose.
A few decisions weren't accidents, and they say more about what Bonfiyah is than any feature list.
In-person first, not the video call. The meeting-bot category is built around dialing into Zoom. The conversations I cared about — the kitchen table, the doctor's office, the field, the room — happen in person, where bots can't go. So Bonfiyah is designed first for capturing the room. It's a universal Apple app — iPhone, iPad, and Mac, kept in step by iCloud sync — but the home turf is the conversation happening in front of you, on purpose.
Identity from voice, never from words. Bonfiyah recognizes people by the sound of their voice, never by reading what they said to guess who they are. Getting someone's identity wrong is the kind of mistake that quietly corrupts everything downstream, so we only trust the signal that's actually trustworthy. We learned that one the hard way, which is the most honest way to learn anything. If you want the mechanics, the Voice ID page lays them out.
Consent built in, in every tier. We're a company that records conversations, run from a two-party-consent state. We don't get to make consent the user's problem and wash our hands. So consent is in the recording flow from the first tap — the rule surfaced for your location, verbal consent captured, an exportable log — for free, for everyone. It's the only honest posture, and it happens to make the better product.
Real about privacy, not absolute. I'll tell you exactly how it works rather than make a slogan of it. Real-time transcription runs on-device; audio leaves your iPhone only for the optional cloud-transcription pass you control, and only if you've enabled it. We don't train AI on your transcripts — that's a binding commitment, not marketing. What I won't tell you is that “your audio never leaves your phone,” because that wouldn't be true, and I'd rather be precise than impressive.
What I'm not going to claim.
Bonfiyah won't make you a better person or fix your calendar. It isn't a productivity philosophy or a habit you have to keep. It doesn't run your meetings or set your goals. It does one thing: it takes the conversations you have and makes sure the parts that matter don't quietly disappear — the commitment, the detail, the thread you'd otherwise lose. If you already remember all of it perfectly, you don't need it. I never did, and I suspect most people don't either.
Where this goes.
We're building in the open and shipping fast, and we'd rather hear from you than guess. If you record real conversations — for work, for your health, for the people you're responsible for — Bonfiyah is free to start, and I'd genuinely like to know what it gets right and what it gets wrong for you. We built the place the stories live. Pull up a seat at the fire.
— Richard
