Tally

A daily ritual for
knowing your own mind

Say what's on your mind. Tally uses AI to reflect it back — distilled and clarified — so you can see your own thoughts more clearly.

Download on the App Store

Reflection, not advice

Some AI-powered apps try to coach you, cheer you on, or diagnose your problems. Tally does none of that. It acts as a mirror — showing you what you said, rephrased and reorganized so you can see it more clearly.

You said
I saw Marcus's name on my phone today and realized we haven't actually talked in like six weeks. Maybe longer. We send reels and stuff but nothing real. I keep meaning to call him but I never do. I don't know, we used to talk all the time, like through everything. I don't think anything happened. I just feel kind of bad about it and I'm not sure what to do.
Tally reflected
You're tracking a shift from active engagement to passive maintenance. The "reels" have become placeholders for a connection that used to be substantive, creating a specific kind of guilt: the friendship hasn't ended, but it's currently lacking the depth you still associate with it.
The tension here is that there's no conflict to resolve — just a slow drift. This makes the silence harder to address because there's nothing to "fix", only a routine to rebuild. You're holding yourself to a standard of what the friendship used to be, while the current reality is defined by low-effort digital pings.
You said
I'm so stressed out about finals. I feel like I'm spending every spare moment studying, but I don't know, it's just not sinking in. I don't know if it's the material or I'm just burned out. Either way, I just want this semester to be over, but I keep picturing my parents and how they'll react if I don't pull off a decent GPA.
Tally reflected
There's a clear disconnect between the volume of effort you're putting in and the lack of retention you're feeling. You've identified two possible culprits — the difficulty of the material or mental exhaustion — but both lead to the same result of spinning your wheels.
The core tension here seems to be that your academic performance isn't just about the credits; it's a proxy for managing your parents' expectations. The "burnout" you're describing might be less about the subject matter and more about the weight of carrying their potential reactions through finals week.

How It Works

1

Talk

Tap record and talk through the day's events and how you felt about them, or anything else that's on your mind.

2

Transcribe

Your audio is sent to the cloud for transcription and cleanup — filler words removed, punctuation fixed — while preserving your meaning exactly.

3

Reflect

Tally reads your entry and writes a reflection: the core themes, tensions, and patterns — distilled into a few clear observations.

4

Remember

Over time, Tally builds a memory of your recurring themes, relationships, and emotional patterns — so its reflections get sharper.

Features

Voice-first

Talking is faster and more honest than typing. Tally is built around your voice, not a text box.

Memory across entries

Tally tracks themes, people, and patterns across your journal — connecting dots you might miss.

Chat with your history

Ask questions about your past entries. "What was I stressed about last month?" "When did I last mention Sarah?"

Backdate entries

Say "this happened yesterday" and Tally adjusts the date automatically, stripping the instruction from the transcript.

Backup & restore

Export your entire journal as JSON. Import it on another device with duplicate detection built in.

FAQ

Using Tally

There's no required structure or prompt. Just hit record and talk about whatever is on your mind — your day, a frustration, a decision you're mulling over, something that happened. Tally works with whatever you give it. The app also shows rotating prompt suggestions if you want a starting point.
Talking is faster, less filtered, and more natural than typing. When you type, you tend to edit as you go — censoring and polishing. When you talk, you're more likely to say what you actually think. That unfiltered input makes for better reflections.
The live preview is intentionally blurred. It's there so you can confirm that recording and transcription are actually working — there's nothing worse than finishing a long brain dump only to discover the mic wasn't connected. But seeing the actual words while you're speaking is distracting: you'll end up worrying about transcription accuracy instead of focusing on what you want to say. The final transcript uses a much better model anyway, so the preview text isn't what you'll end up with.
Tally builds a compact memory — a profile, recurring themes, emotional trajectory, and key people — rather than feeding your entire history into every prompt. It also uses semantic search to find relevant past entries when they'd add context. The result is reflections that get more perceptive over time without requiring the AI to reread everything.

The approach

There are legitimate reasons to be skeptical of AI in personal contexts. The most concerning applications are the ones that simulate emotional connection — chatbots that validate, flatter, and create the illusion of being understood. Tally is built to avoid this entirely. It doesn't converse with you, offer opinions, or play a role. It reorganizes what you said so you can see it more clearly — closer to a structured summary than a conversation. The AI makes journaling easier to maintain (talking is faster than writing) and more useful (a distilled reflection rather than a raw transcript), without the emotional simulation that makes people rightly wary.
ChatGPT is a general-purpose assistant — it tries to help, advise, and solve your problems. Tally deliberately does none of that. Its only job is to reflect your own thoughts back to you in a clearer structure. It won't tell you what to do, won't validate your feelings, and won't play therapist. The value is in the mirror, not the advice.
No. Tally is a journaling tool, not a mental health treatment. It will not diagnose, prescribe, or offer therapeutic interventions. Think of it as a structured way to hear yourself think. If you have mental health concerns, please work with a licensed professional.
Today's AI models excel at telling you what you want to hear. That makes them seductive but ultimately unhealthy as sources of emotional support or advice. Ideally, advice and encouragement come from people you trust, and who know you. Tally is austere by design: it could reassure, validate, and advise, but instead is restrained on principle.
If Tally detects a clear expression of intent to harm yourself or others, it breaks out of its normal mirror mode and provides crisis resources and emergency information. This is the one case where it steps outside its neutral role.

About

Tally is free, and will remain so, as long as costs remain manageable.
Tally is built and maintained by Joe Cheng.

Privacy & data

All of your journal entries, reflections, memories, and chat history are stored on your device, not on any server. There's no backend database, no admin panel, no way to look them up. You can export your full journal at any time as a JSON file from the History screen.
No. The developer cannot read your entries — they're on your device, not on any server the developer controls.
When you finish recording, your audio goes to Google Cloud Storage briefly, then to Google Speech-to-Text for transcription. Your transcript then passes through Vertex AI (Gemini) for cleanup, reflection generation, and memory updates. Audio is deleted from Google's servers immediately after transcription, with a hard 24-hour backstop for anything orphaned.

Google handles this as a contracted processor under their Cloud Data Processing Addendum, which means your data isn't used for advertising or to train their models. The full breakdown is in the Privacy Policy.
Yes. You can export your entire journal as a JSON file from the History screen at any time. To delete everything, uninstall the app — that removes all locally stored data. On web, clearing site data for Tally in your browser settings does the same. There's no server-side account to delete because there isn't one.
No. Your content is used only to process your entries (transcription, reflection, memory updates) and isn't retained afterward for any other purpose, including training.