The 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
This version I rebuilt from scratch. Same idea, same itch: a journal you can talk to that stays out of your way. What changed is underneath — it's an iPhone app, private by default, with your journal living on your device and the AI that makes sense of it running right there on the phone.
If v1 lived and died in my notes and a duct-taped box, this is built to be shareable from day one — easier to use, and honest about what it does.
Why we share it
For us, journalbot 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 Nico also builds — so your journal data can live on your phone, and the server only ever stores what your phone has encrypted for it.