The short answer: if you lose things in the gap between having a thought and writing it down, use Mouthful. That's the single problem it was built for and nothing else on this page closes that gap as fast. If you already keep a tidy system and just want to add to it faster, Apple Reminders and Siri are free and already on your phone. If you run projects with labels, filters and a weekly review, that's Todoist or Things.
We built Mouthful, and we're saying so before anything else. We're also going to tell you exactly where a different app beats ours, by name, with reasons. A comparison that arrives at "and the winner is us" is worth nothing to you, so this one doesn't. Where we haven't tested something, we say so instead of guessing.
That's the deal, and it's why this is the most complete side-by-side of voice-first to-do apps we know of. Everything in it is either publicly documented, or something we've used ourselves and can point at.
Last updated August 2026.
| If this is you | Use |
|---|---|
| Ideas arrive while you're walking, driving or mid-task, and they're gone by the time you could type | Mouthful |
| You want to say four things in one breath and have them sorted for you | Mouthful |
| You want to empty your head once a day and get back a usable list | Mouthful |
| You keep more in your head than you can hold, and you're tired of it | Mouthful |
| You already keep a tidy system and just want to add to it faster | Apple Reminders, via Siri |
| You run projects, with labels, filters, deadlines and a weekly review | Todoist, Things, or TickTick |
| You want the audio itself kept, word for word | Voice Memos, or Apple Notes |
| You need Android, a web app, or shared team lists | Something other than us, for now |
Hold a button, say whatever is in your head, let go. What you said turns into tasks with the dates and reminders already attached. No typing, no menus, no deciding where anything goes. It's the shortest path we know of between a thought arriving and that thought being safely written down.
It's built around the fact that you don't have to say it cleanly. One sentence can hold four things, out of order, with a date buried in the middle:
"bake a cake, buy eggs, remind me tomorrow, eggs before then"
Three tasks, dated, one with a reminder, in about four seconds. Nothing had to be tidied first, and nothing had to be said twice.
It also keeps what you say that isn't a task, which as far as we know nothing else in this category does. "Exam moved to Tuesday." "Roommate owes me forty bucks." Nothing to finish, so no checkbox and no nagging. They sit quietly under your list until the moment you need them, which is usually weeks later and always a relief.
Free to start, and generous about it. AI sorting on the free tier is metered, you can earn more by watching an ad, and a paid tier removes the limit entirely. Better you know that here than on day three.
Mouthful does one thing at full strength instead of six things adequately. Here's what we chose to leave out, so you can rule it in or out in ten seconds:
Free, already installed, and it syncs everywhere Apple syncs. As a place to keep a list, it's good and it costs nothing.
As a way to get things into that list by voice, Mouthful is better, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of taste. Siri takes one instruction at a time and expects a clean command. "Remind me to buy eggs tomorrow" works. Say four things in one breath, out of order, with a date in the middle, and it doesn't survive the trip. That's the exact sentence Mouthful is built to take.
If thoughts genuinely arrive in your head one clean instruction at a time, Reminders is enough. For most people they don't.
Both free, both very good at their job. Voice Memos keeps the recording. Notes keeps the text. Neither is trying to do what we do.
Where they stop: neither turns what you said into something dated that comes back to find you. A voice memo you never play again is the same as not recording it, and that is the exact failure Mouthful was built to end. Capturing was never the hard part. Getting it back at the right moment is, and that is the part we own.
These are project managers, and they're excellent at it. Todoist parses typed natural language well. Things is the nicest to live in if you're all-Apple. TickTick packs the most features in for the price. If you want boards, labels, filters, dependencies and a weekly review, buy one of these. We don't build that and we're not trying to.
They're solving the half of the problem that starts once something is already written down. Mouthful solves the half before that, and for getting a thought out of your head and safely recorded, none of them come close: all three assume you'll sit down and type it in properly.
If you've downloaded one of them twice and stopped using it twice, that's information about the approach, not about your discipline.
Plenty of people run both. Mouthful for getting it out of your head, one of these for running whatever it turns into.
There's a crowd now: Vozly, ListN, Braindump, Nori, VoiceTask AI, with more arriving monthly. Most of them take a sentence and give you back a task, and that's where most of them stop.
We won't publish a scorecard we can't show our working for, because that's what every other vendor comparison in this category does and it's worth nothing. What we will put our name to is the list of things Mouthful does that we haven't seen anywhere else in it:
That's the comparison that matters, and on it we're the most complete option in the category. It's free, and thirty seconds is enough to know.
Does the problem happen at the moment of writing it down, or later?
If things go wrong later, because you wrote it down and never looked, or the system got messy, the fix is a better system. Todoist, Things or Reminders.
If things go wrong at the moment itself, because you thought of it while driving and it was gone by the time you parked, no system fixes that. You never reached the system. That gap is the whole reason Mouthful exists, and closing it is the one thing we've put everything into.
Everything here about Mouthful is written by the person who built it, which is also why it is more specific than anything else you will find on this comparison. Claims about other apps are limited to what is publicly documented or what we have used directly, and where we have not tested something we have said so instead of filling the gap. We would rather be the page you can check than the page that sounds confident.
If something is wrong or has gone out of date, tell us and we'll fix it: [email protected].