Tap 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. Once it reaches the chat, Rafe writes down what you said and shows what he did under his reply, with an Undo. 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. If the box names a plant, the photo is kept on that plant as soon as you send it, and the reply tells you where it went.
Speaking, and the one thing it cannot do
Tap the mic and talk. It keeps listening through your pauses until you tap send or stop. If your phone or the connection ends it, the mic button turns off; tap it again and it adds on to what you already said.
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?
Yes, when the box names a plant. Opened on one of your plants, the photo is kept on that plant the moment you send it, and the reply says so, with Not that plant? in case it is the wrong one. Tap the plant's name off before sending and the photo only goes with your question. 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 the mic and talk. It keeps listening through your pauses until you tap send or stop. If your phone or the connection ends it, the mic button turns off; tap it again and it adds to what you already said. 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 once you send it, anything Rafe writes down shows up under his reply with an Undo.
- 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: it can hand us the same words more than once. We now keep the newest version of each phrase and drop the repeats, the same way the Season Recap's mic does. 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.
- Does it stop listening when I pause?
No. Pauses don't stop it. Stop to look at a plant and it keeps listening; tap stop or send when you're done. On Android you may hear the listening beep again after a pause, which is the phone picking back up. If the phone or the connection ends it, the mic button turns off and you tap it again. Nothing you already said gets wiped.
- One of my plants says "Rafe added this" under its name. What does that mean?
Exactly what it says, and it is there so you never have to wonder — new on 31 August 2026.
Rafe can add plants for you. Months later, looking at a plant, did I put this in or did Rafe? is a real question and the answer used to be nowhere.
The line also says how it was allowed. You said yes to this one means Rafe asked and you tapped a button. You let him write things down or you let him do everything mean it was covered by a setting you had already chosen — which you can change any time under When Rafe asks on your profile.
There is no undo button on that line, on purpose. This page already has the two honest ways to remove a plant, and they are genuinely different: Say it is done, in the plant's ⋯ menu, keeps everything you recorded and drops it off your list, and Delete this plant is for something added by mistake. A single generic undo would have to guess which you meant.
- The microphone button says "Say it out loud" now. Did it used to do something else?
No — it always went to Rafe. It just never said so.
That button has handed what you say straight to Rafe for a long time, along with the plant you were looking at and any picture you took. The label said Say it. ⚠ Which is true, and tells you nothing about where it goes.
Nothing about how it works has changed. Same one tap, same speed — it now says Say it out loud, and when you are talking the box says Rafe is listening…, so you know who you are talking to.
Shipped 2026-08-11. Last checked 2026-10-06. Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us — support docs going stale is a bug.