GardenTap the microphone and start talking
Live · This works today.
The microphone button on every screen opens a small box and starts listening straight away, without leaving the screen you are on. Say what you did, type it, or photograph it, then tap send — that is when it goes to the chat. Opened on one of your plants the box names that plant, and you can tap the name to drop it if your question is about something else. Nothing is written into your garden until the app has read it back to you on a card and you have agreed. Speaking needs a connection because the words are turned into text on a server; typing never does.
Tap it and talk. That is the whole thing.
The microphone sits on every screen. Tapping it does not take you anywhere — it opens a small box where you are already standing and starts listening.
Say what you did. Tap send. Then it takes you to the chat, with your message already on its way. Going somewhere is the reward for finishing, not the price of starting.
Standing at a plant, it knows which plant
Open it on one of your plants and the box says About your Bush bean before you say a word. Talk, and the answer comes back about that plant — its age, its bed, what you have written down about it — instead of about beans in general.
If it has guessed wrong, tap the name and it lets go. You might be standing at the beans and thinking about the tomatoes; that happens, and it is why the app shows you what it assumed instead of quietly using it. Tap it again to put it back.
On Today, Garden, Plan or Profile there is no name to show, because there is no one plant you are looking at. Nothing is guessed from nothing.
And you can photograph the thing you are asking about
Take a photo is in the box now. Point it at whatever you cannot name — the seedling coming up, the spots on a leaf — and send that instead of describing it. A picture on its own is a whole question; you do not have to type anything with it.
The photo goes with your question and with the plant, if the app knows which one. It is not written into that plant's diary yet — nothing is, until you have seen the card and agreed.
Speaking, and the one thing it cannot do
It keeps listening through pauses, because describing what you did in a garden is not one clean sentence.
It needs a connection. Your phone sends the sound away to be turned into text; there is no version of that which happens on the phone itself. That sits oddly beside everything else in this app, which is built so that writing something down never waits for signal — so it is worth being plain about: typing always works, anywhere, and saves instantly. Speaking is a shortcut on top of that, not a replacement for it.
If there is no microphone next to Send, either the browser does not do it — Firefox does not — or it was turned down for this site. Nothing is broken and there is nothing to fix; the keyboard is right there.
Nothing is written until you have seen it
Tapping a row records nothing. Speaking records nothing. Sending a message records nothing on its own — the app reads what you said, shows you a card with what it thinks you meant, and waits.
That is the same rule everywhere else in the app, and it is the reason the button can afford to be this simple: it never has to be sure what you meant, because it never acts on a guess.
Common questions
- What does the microphone button do?
- It opens a small box **on the screen you are already on** and starts listening immediately. Say what you did. The words appear as you talk, and you can fix any of them by typing. Tap **Send** and it goes to the chat, which reads it and shows you a card of what it thinks you meant. **Nothing leaves the box until you send, and nothing is written into your garden until you agree to the card.**
- It used to have buttons for different kinds of note. What happened to them?
- They were slower than doing nothing. For a day, tapping it gave you a short list — *Something's wrong*, *Just a note* — and each one opened the chat. **That is more taps than just opening the chat**, which is exactly what the person who asked for the feature said after using it on his own phone for an evening. So the list is gone and the microphone is the whole button. **You do not have to tell it what kind of thing you are about to say; you just say it.**
- How does it know which plant I am asking about?
- **Because of the screen you opened it from.** Standing on one of your plants, the box shows that plant's name at the top before you say anything — and the answer comes back about that plant rather than about the crop in general: how old it is, which bed it is in, what you have already written down about it. **On Today, Garden, Plan or Profile it shows nothing**, because there is no single plant you are looking at, and a guess made from nothing is worse than no guess. **One part of this was broken until 26 August 2026.** The assistant was sent that plant's own diary under a heading saying *this plant's diary* — and was never told which plant. Every other line in the same message named its plant, so it was left to work it out, and the easiest way to work it out was to match a diary line against a named one. ⚠ **If you water two plants on the same day and write the same words, that match lands on the wrong plant** — and it sounds sure, because it looks like it checked. **Now the plant is named, and its row in the list is marked** — which is what you need if you have two of the same thing in the same bed. **Nothing you had written down was ever wrong.** What was wrong was which plant the answer thought it was about.
- It named the wrong plant. I was standing at the beans and thinking about the tomatoes.
- **Tap the name and it lets go of it.** That is the whole reason the name is on screen instead of quietly attached in the background: you see what the app assumed before you speak, and one tap removes it. Tap it again and it comes back — it is a switch, not a dismissal, so a stray tap costs you nothing. **We show it rather than use it silently on purpose.** An answer confidently about the wrong plant is worse than an answer that had to ask, because it sounds finished.
- Can I take a picture from here?
- **Yes — Take a photo is in the box.** Point it at whatever you cannot put into words, send it, and the chat answers about that. **A picture on its own is enough**; you do not have to type anything alongside it. There is a quieter link under it for picking one you took earlier, for the times you photograph a leaf in the garden and sit down at the kitchen table to deal with it.
- Does the photo go into the plant's diary straight away?
- **No, and that is deliberate.** Nothing this button does is written into your garden until the app has read it back to you on a card and you have agreed — the picture included. It travels with your question, and it lands in the plant's record when you accept the note the chat offers. If you change your mind before sending, **Remove** takes it back off.
- Can I speak instead of typing?
- That is the whole point of the button — tap it and talk. It keeps listening through pauses, so you can stop mid-sentence to look at something and carry on. **If you do not see a microphone, your browser does not support it or the microphone was turned down for this site**, and typing works exactly the same. Firefox does not support it at all.
- Why does speaking need a connection when everything else works offline?
- Because your words are turned into text on a server rather than on your phone — that is how the browser does it, and there is no offline version of it. **Everything else still works with no signal**: type your note in a dead spot and it saves on your phone straight away and goes up when you have signal, the same as every other thing you record. Speaking is the one input that needs a connection, so the keyboard is always there underneath it.
- Does it record what I say?
- The words go to your browser's speech service to be turned into text — that is the browser doing it, not us — and what comes back lands in the message box for you to read before you send it. **Nothing is sent to us until you tap Send**, and nothing is written into your garden until you have seen the card and confirmed it.
- My words came out repeated — "I I I took I took the seeds out". Is that fixed?
- **We think so, and we are not going to tell you it is until you have tried it.** This one took three goes and the first two were us fixing the wrong thing. Your phone was handing us the sentence already doubled, and we kept improving how we read it. **The real cause is a known bug in Chrome on Android**: there is a mode where it listens continuously, and in that mode it repeats what it hears. We were using it. **We are not any more** — it now listens for one thing at a time, which is what every report of this bug recommends. If it repeats again, tap the link at the bottom of the box and tell us a fourth time.
- I told it I did a job it was asking me to do. Does that tick it off my list?
- **Yes, when it is clear which job you mean.** Say you pruned the apple while the app is asking you to prune the apple, and the card says so before you save: *this goes on Bramley and ticks Winter prune off Today*. Tap Save and the job is done. **If two of your plants are waiting on the same kind of job, it does not guess** — it writes the note and leaves both jobs open for you to tick, because ticking the wrong one would leave a job you never did looking finished for the rest of the year.
- It said it would record how many. Where does that number go?
- Onto the plant itself, as the number of plants — the same box you would fill in on the plant's own page. **Only if that box is empty.** If you have already put a number there by hand, nothing you say in the chat will change it: a number you typed is worth more than a number we heard. The card names the plant before you save, and you can simply not save it.
- I said I planted those seeds in that bucket and never named the plant. Will it know which one?
- **If there is only one plant in that bucket, yes.** The place you named is enough — it finds the plant living there and puts the note, the date and the number on it. If there are two, it does not choose: the note is still written and kept, and the number is left for you, because putting your four on the wrong plant is a mistake you would never think to go looking for.
- It stops listening when I pause. Why?
- **Because that is the setting that works.** Chrome on Android has a continuous mode and it is the thing that was repeating your words, so we do not use it. One tap listens for one thing. **If you have more to say, tap the microphone again and it adds to what is already there** — nothing you already said gets wiped. We could restart it automatically for you and chose not to: **Android plays its listening beep every single time**, so a pause to look at a plant would mean being beeped at, by an app, in your garden.
Shipped 2026-08-11. Last checked 2026-08-26. Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us — support docs going stale is a bug.