The idea for HEARD was born one evening as my wife and I sat at the dinner table and she described to me some funny thing my 2 yr old son had said earlier that day... I wondered out loud: "How great would it be to have an app that lets you save such cute little things (that usually came as a surprise)... but AFTER you had already heard them..." and she said: "that would be an amazing thing to have ... but how is that possible ?"

Well, by that time I already knew I had to build something like that, and a precursor to HEARD was born.... It has made us feel surprisingly empowered over the past several months we have been using it ....

Now HEARD is available for everyone to enjoy as an iPhone app available on the App Store ... Please check it out and share with people who you think might benefit from it. In particular any parents with young kids that want to preserve these wonderful moments with their children. Thanks guys!

It's a cool app because I have a goofy friend whose daily banter rivals Karl Pilkington. "I wish someone was recording this" is said daily regarding his routine.

That said, I personally would hate this app being used on myself. The thought of having to re-hear anything I said as a small child makes me cringe. My Facebook feed is now dominated by baby pics and I often wonder what the kids will think about having everything in their life since infancy logged on the internet without any say in the matter.

Any info on what this does to the battery life? It is a cool idea but I can imagine it totally kills the battery if it's always recording.

Thanks for asking. I keep it running in the background regularly and get 12 hrs easily and 15hrs normal with my iPhone 5 ...

Compared to something like navigation which drains it in ~4 hrs.

So the extra battery drain will not be a deal breaker for many ... but it still might be for some.... Totally depends on the user's situation in my opinion.

I should have said ... the variability is b/c of what else I happen to be doing with my phone that day...

This is the single most important question I had. It can't be much worse than running voice memo all the time, which isn't that bad.

Great idea, but aren't there some laws that prohibit recording people without consent?

There are a few points that help:

1) This is not meant to be a spying device (given it can not remember anything more than 5 mins old anyway).

2)Instead it is meant to be kind of a "personal memory enhancer" .... so you are basically recording conversations you are a part of and there are no laws against that.

Infact an excellent use of this is to fight bullying, where you can capture the bully (or black mailer etc) without their knowledge and there is nothing illegal about it because you are a part of that conversation.

3) Nothing gets written to long term memory unless the user tells the app to do so.

4) we don't let the user do anything that they cannot already do with an actively recording (Apple supplied) Voice Memo app. We just it make more convenient to capture the interesting parts of their life without having to sift through gigs of audio data every day

> so you are basically recording conversations you are a part of and there are no laws against that.

Depends on your jurisdiction, at least in situations where the other party is not aware they are being recorded.

In the US, 12 states forbid recording of conversation without the consent of all parties. See http://www.rcfp.org/first-amendment-handbook/introduction-re... - some may exempt situations where the party being recorded should have a reasonable expectation of being recorded, e.g. consider a public speech.

Outside the US this can be an even thornier issue, with many countries having substantially stricter privacy laws.

The rules about what you can and cannot record without consent vary by state and situation:

http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/recording-phone-calls-and-co...

None of your comments about the length of time the recording remains available or about duplication of existing features address the OP's question.

Also, you say:

" .... so you are basically recording conversations you are a part of and there are no laws against that."

I think that's simplistic enough to make it simply false. This looks like a good place to start:

* http://legallad.quickanddirtytips.com/the-legality-of-record...

In terms of Australian law none of this is relevant - you're required by law to get the consent of anyone you're taking an audio recording of.

So in Australia at least you'd have a really hard time running this legally.

5) There is a big toggle switch that lets the user shut ON/Off background listening ....

Ship it with a t-shirt that says "this conversation may be recorded for quality purposes."

This looks really neat. I'm going to give it a try. One suggestion: put an itunes link on the home page :)

edit: an _obvious_ link, I should say. I kept clicking around without luck until finally I thought to click the "app store" text.

Also, it was completely not obvious to me that I could scroll on the page, and when I did scroll and a menu appeared out of nowhere it freaked me out.

Good points ... will fix :-)

How long before we see a video equivalent for Google Glass? Creepy.

How long until it is available for android? With regard to the usefulness against bullying, you don't know what I would have given to have this app a year or two ago...

Sorry to hear about your situation few years back ... But I am glad you wrote this comment b/c up until you said it ... my comments about bullying were based solely on a hunch...

If one person in that situation can benefit from it today ... I would think the whole thing paid off...

I cannot give a date on Android yet, but its definitely coming ... :-)

Is 5 minutes the maximum? Consider extending that option. Bullying and Police abuse situations can last longer than 5 minutes before someone can be safe enough to activate the saving.

It can be increased ... but not by a whole lot, as that means more RAM consumed by this background app .... (thats the way its currently designed ...)

Despite the drawbacks mentioned here, it's a very neat idea.

Also - kudos for making it happen. I know how hard it could be to have a nice idea and find some time to make it happen.

Thanks!

Nice idea, but I don't really like the in-call style header visible everywhere. I believe there is no way to make it work without it without jailbreaking?

I expect ios7 will make that part less intrusive ... will check.

Two things:

1) Battery killer, right? 2) My phone is usually in my pocket... is it going to catch things that are, I don't know, 5 feet away if it's in my pocket?

Both valid concerns ... it works reasonably well on both counts in my opinion (but others will need to try it to form their own opinions)...

Btw, I dog-fooded it for several months before deciding to release publicly, based on how useful I found it :-)

What about the pocket? Does the recording still come through okay?

Slightly worse than when holding the phone in your hand ... but overall perfectly audible. Thanks.

nice app and a neat site as well. how did you build it?

Thanks! :-) The site is built using a great (and very economical) theme from themeforest: http://themeforest.net/item/vireo-ultra-responsive-app-landi...

NSA got it covered. They save everything these days.

hehe ... did they not start a free backup/retrieval service for all the data ? One you can't actually opt out of :-)