Voice notes for your Todoist inbox

by Paul Crowley

I want a button on my Android phone that drops voice notes into my GTD inbox. I want the raw audio, not the transcription; I find the transcription errors too frustrating. I had a rather inadequate solution to this for Zendone, but now I’m switching to Todoist for better collaboration with Jess, and it took quite a bit of hunting to find a good way.

  1. If you don’t already have them, create accounts on
  2. Ensure you’re logged into Dropbox in your mobile browser.
  3. Set up Netmemo Plus. It has to be Netmemo Plus, not Netmemo; only the premium version has Dropbox integration.
    1. Install Netmemo Plus from the Play Store
    2. Launch it
    3. Go to settings (the gear icon)
    4. Go to “Setup Dropbox connection”
    5. Allow Netmemo Plus to access Dropbox
    6. Long-press the Netmemo Plus icon on your home screen
    7. Drag it to the X Remove site onscreen
    8. Long-press the home screen to set up a widget
    9. Long-press the Netmemo shortcut (the round one)
    10. Drop onto a good location on your home screen
    11. Select Dropbox as the target
    12. Label the shortcut “Inbox”
    13. Select “Inbox” as the destination folder
    14. Click to create shortcut
  4. Set up this recipe to create an item in your Todoist inbox linking to the Dropbox entry every time you record a voice note. You may need to connect Dropbox and Todoist to IFTTT along the way.

As standard, the URL to your voice note will be shortened in IFTTT’s custom shortener. I’m made a bit nervous by this; your Dropbox note can be heard by anyone who has the URL, and while Dropbox use a very long, clearly unguessable URL for this, IFTTT automatically shorten it to a 7-character URL. That’s a space of only 3E12 URLs. You can however turn off all shortening in your IFTTT settings.

This isn’t quite as good as native support would be, in that I’d rather that the audio was directly in Todoist rather than indirected into Dropbox; unfortunately it takes around four clicks to create such a note in Todoist, which is way beyond acceptable. However, it’s better than what I had for Zendone, since Netmemo notes play directly in the browser.  If you use it, please do let me know—thanks!