journal bot
A journal you can talk to, text, or photo — through Telegram. You send voice notes, set reminders (/remindme), and ask things in the moment. When you sit down to read back the week, you open the web (calendar, search, charts, edits). AI runs locally on the server; the current configuration does not send content to third-party AI APIs.
What it is
- A place to leave a thought when you have one, in the easiest possible way: by talking.
- A way to find that thought again, months later, by asking your bot.
- A small experiment in keeping the AI parts of your life on a server you trust.
What it isn't
- It's not a social app. There's no feed, no followers, no sharing.
- It's not an AI chatbot. The bot is a transport — your words are stored as your words, not as a model's interpretation of them.
- It's not a productivity tool. There are no tasks, no streaks, no scoring.
Privacy & security
AI processing runs locally on the server. Sensitive data (transcripts, summaries, mood, tags) is encrypted at rest with a per-user key. A passphrase mode is available in which the operator cannot decrypt your data at rest. The current install does not run Google Analytics, Mixpanel, or Sentry.
🔒 Dive into how security worksThe story behind it
Hi, I'm Nico. I live in New York; I grew up in Chile. I'm building this with Kyle — my roommate, a software engineer, a friend. I started it; the two of us are turning it into something real.
How this started
When I was younger, I spent two years living in Peru doing volunteer service work. That's where I first learned about keeping a journal — and where I first ran into the same problem most people have with it: actually doing it. Sitting down at the end of a long day to write felt like one more thing on the list. But every time I kept at it, the value was undeniable. Months later, reading back, the entries felt like gold.
A few years ago I built v1: a phone call I'd receive every evening, automatically transcribed and saved to a database. It worked for me. It also lived on a cloud provider whose terms I had to take on faith, was held together with duct tape, and was something only I could ever use.
Building it for real
v2 — what you're looking at — I rebuilt from scratch. Same idea, same itch: a journal you can talk to that stays out of your way. What changed is underneath: this version is Telegram-first, private by default, encrypted at rest, and integrated with something you already do every day.
If v1 lived and died in my notes and a duct-taped box, v2 is built to be shareable from day one — cheaper to run, easier to use, and honest about what it does.
Why we share it
For us, journal bot is helping our lives — that's why we're building it. First we make it fit our own needs, then we share it. We think that's what keeps app-building honest: when you actually use the thing every day, you can't fake it.
Made by
Nico & Kyle. Independent project, no company behind it. The codebase is private for now while we evaluate the model — it may open up to the community later on.
Designed to eventually run on or with nicOS, a privacy-first phone OS I also build. When that lands, your journal data can live on your phone — and the server only stores what your phone has encrypted for it.