Blog
Notes from around the fire.
Feature deep-dives, comparison breakdowns, founder notes, and use-case guides. Updated about once a week.
The forgetting problem
The forgetting problem
Your notes are a sampling process (and the sample is biased).
Hand notes capture what catches your attention, in the order it catches it — which systematically misses the late, casual, conditional, or inconvenient commitment. Why the method itself is the problem.
2026-06-13
Read the post →The forgetting problem
The unresolved-from-last-time tax.
Every recurring meeting that restarts cold pays a tax: re-explaining, re-deciding, re-litigating what was already settled. What it costs over a year, and how Pre-Brief and People Memory erase it.
2026-07-31
Read the post →The forgetting problem
The hidden cost of forgetting what was said in your meetings.
You recall about a fifth of a conversation a week later — and the fifth you keep isn't the fifth that mattered. What forgetting actually costs, and why bullet summaries make it worse.
2026-06-08
Read the post →How the category is changing
How the category is changing
Bonfiyah and Otter: same word, different product.
A fair contrast. Meeting bots dial into video calls and forget the speaker each time. Bonfiyah is in-person, iPhone-native, and remembers people across recordings. Where each one fits.
2026-06-22
Read the post →How the category is changing
AI meeting summaries are the wrong shape.
Bullet-point summaries compress the wrong axis. They delete attribution, conditions, exact words, and contradictions — the four things you actually go back for. A look at what the category gets wrong.
2026-06-09
Read the post →How the category is changing
The conversation app that remembers people, not just recordings.
Per-recording speaker labels are a dead end. Speaker memory — recognizing the same person across every conversation, from voice alone — is the missing primitive, and the thing every other feature stands on.
2026-06-11
Read the post →Privacy & consent
Privacy & consent
What 'on-device' actually means (and what it doesn't).
A precise, honest privacy explainer: real-time transcription runs on-device; audio leaves your iPhone only for the optional cloud pass you control. Why we won't make the absolute claim everyone else does.
2026-06-15
Read the post →Privacy & consent
Recording across state lines: a practical guide for traveling professionals.
Interstate calls, the strictest-state rule, and how the consent module surfaces the rule wherever you are. Practical, not legal advice — but enough to keep you on the right side of the line.
2026-08-14
Read the post →Privacy & consent
Two-party consent, explained for people who record real conversations.
One-party, two-party, all-party — in plain language, the part most apps get wrong, and why consent belongs in every tier including free. Surfaces the rule; never tells you a recording is legal.
2026-06-12
Read the post →Guides
Guides
Recording intake conversations: therapy, coaching, and client onboarding.
For practitioners who run repeated 1:1 sessions — speaker memory, a Pre-Brief before each session, consent in every tier, and precise privacy. How Bonfiyah fits a practice.
2026-07-10
Read the post →Guides
How to record a doctor's appointment (and why a voice memo isn't enough).
Patients forget 40–80% of what's said in a visit. The etiquette, the consent question, and what Bonfiyah pulls out of an appointment that a plain recording can't.
2026-06-18
Read the post →Guides
Recording field and sales conversations (when the meeting isn't on Zoom).
The in-person conversation is the meeting-bot blind spot. How speaker memory, Promise Tracker, and consent-in-every-tier change the job for reps who work in rooms, cars, and job sites.
2026-07-14
Read the post →Pro AI
Pro AI
Action Items, done right: the to-do list you didn't have to write.
How Action Items differs from Promise Tracker — tasks vs. commitments — pulled straight from the conversation, with nothing to maintain by hand. A flagship Pro AI surface in depth.
2026-06-26
Read the post →Pro AI
The Daily Brief: your conversations, summed up each morning.
What surfaced across yesterday's recordings, what's coming due, the open threads — in one morning read. How the Daily Brief is built and what it leaves out.
2026-07-03
Read the post →Pro AI
Speaker Themes: how each person in your life actually talks.
The topics a person returns to, how they hedge, the rhythm of how they commit — surfaced across many conversations. A picture of someone that no single recording could give you.
2026-07-24
Read the post →Pro AI
Projects: organizing many conversations without lifting a finger.
Grouping related recordings, and the Project Context that reasons within a workstream — so the thread of a months-long project stays whole. No manual filing required.
2026-08-07
Read the post →Pro AI
Promise Tracker: every commitment, attributed and tracked to closure.
What counts as a promise — conditional, dated, attributed — how the exact quote anchors each one, and how it's tracked from 'I'll send that Friday' to done. One of the five flagship Pro AI surfaces.
2026-06-16
Read the post →Pro AI
Truth Layer: catching the 'wait, didn't you say…' moments.
Cross-recording reasoning that flags status drift, number drift, and contradicted commitments across weeks of conversations — in a deliberately non-hostile tone. How it works and where it stays quiet.
2026-06-20
Read the post →Pro AI
Pre-Brief: walk into every conversation already caught up.
A one-page recap before each conversation — open promises, what happened last time, what's changed since. Built from People Memory so both sides walk in ready.
2026-06-24
Read the post →Pro AI
People Memory: a living picture of everyone you talk to.
Auto-built per-person profiles from voice-only identity — the hub that powers Pre-Brief, Truth Layer, and Speaker Themes. The picture fills itself in as you record.
2026-06-30
Read the post →Pro AI
Story Mode: the whole conversation, told as a story you can share.
A narrative recap instead of a wall of bullets — built to hand to someone who wasn't in the room and have them actually understand what happened.
2026-07-07
Read the post →Pro AI
Why Bonfiyah ships three personality lenses, not one.
MBTI Compatibility, Ray Dalio Pointillist Painting, 9-box Team Dynamics. Same Big Five trait scores, three different views. What each is best at, why we ship all three, and what to do when they disagree.
2026-05-07
Read the post →Founder
Founder
What we got wrong, then fixed: identity from voice, never from text.
The voice-only identity decision and the cascade failure that taught it. An honest, specific, learned-the-hard-way founder note about why a name in a transcript is never enough.
2026-07-17
Read the post →Founder
Building in the open: 60 days after launch.
What people actually used, what surprised me, what's next. An honest, numbers-light retrospective written two months after Bonfiyah went live.
2026-08-18
Read the post →Founder
Why we built Bonfiyah.
The forgetting that kept happening, the realization that the unit wasn't the recording but the commitment and the person, and the choices made on purpose — privacy, consent, Apple-only, no team.
2026-06-16
Read the post →Founder
How the Bonfiyah Friends referral program actually works.
Both sides earn a real free month per paid signup. No cap. Twelve referrals = a free year. The full mechanics, the math at scale, and why I designed it the way I did.
2026-05-09
Read the post →Founder
Why we don't have a web app, and won't.
Asked twice a week. The answer is the same every time. Architectural reasons, privacy reasons, and the strategy reason solo apps work in 2026.
2026-05-07
Read the post →Engineering
Engineering
The exact prompt-caching strategy that makes our AI summaries 90% cheaper.
How content-signature caching plus the provider's prompt-cache layer gets per-summary inference cost into single-digit cents on the cache-miss path.
2026-05-07
Read the post →Engineering
How we caught three false-positive speaker IDs and what we did about them.
Two siblings bound to one identity. One person fragmented across two devices. A hybrid cluster silently mixing two voices. Three real production failures and the fixes that shipped.
2026-05-07
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