SmartNotes

SmartNotes is a desktop companion for Cradle. It captures a thought the moment it happens: you speak out loud, the app takes a screenshot of what is on screen, and transcribes your voice locally with whisper.cpp. Every note is anchored to a moment — visual context + transcript + timestamp + source.

Nothing leaves your device unless you choose to send it to Cradle.

What SmartNotes does

• Voice-activated capture. VAD detects the start of speech, takes one screenshot, and buffers audio until the phrase ends.
• 7-second debounce. A protective cooldown between notes so one train of thought stays as one note, even with pauses.
• Local transcription. whisper.cpp with Metal acceleration on Apple Silicon, and Vulkan or CPU fallback on Windows and Linux.
• Downloadable models. Choose tiny / base / small / medium to match your hardware, directly from the UI.
• Issue classification. Each note is heuristically tagged as decision, observation, or question.
• Cradle integration. Via MCP, SmartNotes can summarize notes and submit selected issues into Cradle's shared Inbox for triage.
• Fully offline. No cloud API is required for capture or transcription.

When to use it

Use SmartNotes when the best ideas arrive at the worst moments — while watching a video, reading a document, reviewing someone else's code, or sitting on a demo. Instead of losing context ten minutes later, you keep the moment: what you saw and what you said.

Where the data lives

Next steps

• Install and set up SmartNotes.
• Learn how a capture session works.
• Connect SmartNotes to Cradle.