What voice entry does
Sometimes your hands are full, or you are walking out of a shop and do not want to tap through a form. Voice entry lets you say the expense instead. On the add sheet, a microphone labelled Say it sits next to the "Or type it" box. Tap it, say something like "24.80 coffee with Sam", and SpendWe turns your words into an expense for you to check.
Voice is a new way into something SpendWe already does. When you type a sentence in the "Or type it" box, SpendWe reads the amount, the category, who paid and the date out of it. Voice entry sends what you said through that same sentence reader, so it understands what typing understands: relative dates such as "yesterday", the names of the people in your household, and the keywords of your categories, in English and in French.
How to add an expense by voice
- Open the add sheet and tap the microphone next to the "Or type it" box. The first time, you are asked to allow the microphone, with a line explaining that your voice is recognised on the device.
- Say the expense. For example "12.50 lunch yesterday" or "8.50 taxi". Your words appear in the box as you speak.
- Stop. Listening stops on its own after a short pause, or when you tap the button a second time.
- Check the card. SpendWe shows what it understood: the amount, the category, the date and who paid, with the rest of the sentence as the note.
- Save, or edit. Tap Save to add the expense, or Edit to adjust any field first. The words stay in the box as ordinary text, so you can also correct them by hand.
Always confirmed before it is saved
A typed sentence that is perfectly clear is saved at once. A spoken one never is. Speech can be misheard, and a misheard amount is money, so every voice entry shows the confirm card first and you decide.
When the sentence is unclear, for example there is no amount, two amounts, a payer SpendWe does not know, or no obvious category, you get the same preview card as when you type: it shows what it understood and says in words what to check. If SpendWe did not catch an amount at all, it says so and keeps your words in the box so you can fix them or type the figure.
Your voice stays on your phone
Speech is recognised on the device only, on every phone and whatever your AI setting. The audio never leaves the device, is never saved to a file and is not kept after you stop. The words you said are treated like a sentence you typed: they stay in the add sheet until you save or discard them.
Where SpendWe cannot be sure that recognition happens on the device, there is no microphone. That is the case on Android 10 and 11, and in browsers without on-device speech recognition, which today is most browsers. On those, typing the sentence works exactly as before. If your phone needs to download its speech model for your language first, SpendWe tells you in one sentence and asks before the download.
One optional extra involves the cloud. If you have switched on Use AI, and only when the sentence left the category unclear, the text of the sentence, never the audio, may be sent to suggest a category. You still confirm it on the card. This category help is planned for SpendWe Pro, which is not on sale yet; see pricing and the Privacy Policy for what AI requests send.
What is free, and the limits
Voice entry is free for everyone, like typing an expense, with no monthly limit. It works offline once your phone has the speech model for your language. It is in the iPhone, iPad and Android apps, and in the web app only in a browser that can recognise speech on the device.
A few things it does not do. It reads one expense per sentence: "12 coffee and 30 taxi" opens the preview card instead of saving two rows. A currency you say, such as "dollars", is not converted; the expense stays in your entry currency, and for a receipt in another currency the receipt scanner converts it. Amounts said as words rather than digits are not read yet. There is no wake word, and voice is for adding new expenses, not for editing existing ones.
