Don't wait for the right moment to listen, when you can read.
NOVOCAL turns every voice message into text, instantly. Read it when you want, wherever you are, in the language you need. And take back control of your time.
A COMMOEDIA production
Hi, so, like I was saying… listen, in the end they've moved the meeting to Thursday at 3:30, and we'll meet straight at 12 Rizzoli Street, second floor. Bring the updated copy of the quote, don't forget. I'll tell you the rest when I see you.
The content is locked in therethe time it takes to reach the detail you need, instead of waiting for it to turn up.
the volume you need to read a voice message in a meeting, on a train, at night beside someone asleep.
set the language once: from then on every voice message arrives already transcribed the way you need it.
The pace at which your brain takes it all in, losing nothing.
The pace at which a voice message hands them to you.
Same sentence, same words: the reader finished four seconds earlier. On a three-minute voice message that becomes more than a minute.
The difference isn't your ability. It's time spent at someone else's pace.
A 2:47 voice message holds around 420 words: read in full that is 1:33, and the detail you were after turns up long before.
Sources for both figures: Brysbaert (2019), How many words do we read per minute?, on silent reading speed; Yuan, Liberman and Cieri (2006) on the pace of conversational speech.
Sending one saves time.
Receiving one costs it.
Recording a voice message takes ten seconds and lets you do something else meanwhile. Listening to one takes three minutes and needs quiet, headphones, the right moment — plus the patience to wait for the point to arrive.
The speaker sets the pace
Press and hold, talk while walking, done. No effort, no editing. The message leaves already relieved of its weight.
The listener has to take it
They have to stop, find somewhere private, find the right moment. Or put it off — and pile up a backlog of audio and frustration.
NOVOCAL evens out the two sides: let them talk, and take your own time back.
Four things text can do
and audio can't.
Skim, don't sit through
Audio forces the speaker's pace on you. Text you scan with your eyes, skipping the padding to reach the substance.
“Two minutes of voice, twenty seconds of reading.”Find it without replaying
What was the address? What time was the meeting? In a voice message it's a needle in a haystack. In text it's right there.
“Don't start over just to find a date.”Read without a sound
In a meeting, in class, on a silent train. No phone against your ear, no conversation bouncing off the walls.
“Sorry, I can't listen right now.”Mute the people who stress you out
A message you read arrives without tone of voice, without pressure. Complaints turn into information: you stay functional.
“Same words, half the weight.”If you have to guess,
you're not reading: you're decoding.
Automatic transcripts hand you a heap of words and leave you the dirty work: adding the punctuation, guessing the pauses, hoping you haven't misread it.
yeah so like i was saying then thursday no wait friday anyway at twelve rizzoli street if i remember right second floor bring the quote
Like I was saying: Thursday… no, wait, Friday. Anyway, 12 Rizzoli Street, second floor. Bring the quote.
It lifts the voice out of the noise
Traffic, crowded bars, wind, speakerphone in the car. The engine separates speech from background and transcribes what matters.
It understands accents and dialects
No robotic sentences, no dictating the punctuation. Talk the way you talk: the meaning stays intact.
It gives back the sense, not just the words
Punctuation, pauses, second thoughts. Clean text you read right the first time, with nothing to interpret.
Multilingual, chat by chat
Your sister in Italian, your client in Munich in German, your colleague in Madrid in Spanish. Set the language once and never think about it again.
For anyone who gets more voice messages than they can listen to.
And for the people voice messages have shut out. They have become the daily language of families, work groups and friendships: making them readable isn't a setting buried in a menu, it's the heart of the app.
People at work who can't stopMeetings, building sites, open-plan offices. Weigh up the urgency in seconds and decide when to reply.
Students who take notes out loudLectures, study groups, reminders recorded in a hurry: it all becomes searchable text.
People who are deaf or hard of hearingA message that becomes text is a message anyone can read. Nobody is left out of the conversation.
People living across languagesClients, colleagues and family scattered around: every chat in its own language, with no translating by hand.
What people ask us most
What is NOVOCAL?
NOVOCAL is an iPhone and Android app that turns voice messages into text. Instead of listening to three minutes of audio, you read the transcript in seconds, whenever and wherever you like. It is made by COMMOEDIA Srl, an Italian company working since 2000.
Why is reading a voice message faster than listening to it?
Because you set the pace. A voice message hands you around 150 words per minute, which is the speed of speech; reading, the brain processes around 270. On top of that, text can be scanned with the eyes, while audio is linear: to reach the point you have to listen to everything that comes before it.
What happens to my voice messages?
The audio is sent to the speech recognition engine without any of your identifying details and processed only for as long as it takes to produce the text: as soon as the transcript is ready, the audio file is deleted from our systems and is not stored anywhere. The full path the data takes is set out in the privacy policy.
Does NOVOCAL recognise dialects and accents?
Yes. The speech recognition is trained on real speech, with regional accents and dialect. There is no need to spell out syllables or dictate punctuation: talk normally and the sentence keeps its meaning.
Does transcription work with background noise?
Yes. The technology lifts the voice out of ambient noise — traffic, crowded venues, wind, speakerphone in the car — and returns clean text even when the audio was recorded in difficult conditions.
What languages does NOVOCAL work in?
NOVOCAL is multilingual and the language is set once, chat by chat: every conversation is transcribed in the language you assigned to it, with no switching for each message. It is built for people who work or live across languages.
Is NOVOCAL useful for deaf and hard of hearing people?
Yes, and it is one of the reasons it exists. Making a voice message readable means making it available to people who cannot listen to it: for deaf and hard of hearing people a transcript isn't a convenience, it is what keeps them inside the conversation.
What devices is NOVOCAL available on?
NOVOCAL is available for iPhone on the App Store and for Android on Google Play.
Got a question,
or an idea to put to us?
We answer everyone: questions about the app, bug reports, partnership proposals, licensing for companies and newsrooms. If you would rather call or write, the details are at the foot of the page.