Social audio & chat — how VooMe, Discover and your chats fit together.
VoiceApp is two things in one app: a social audio platform where your voice goes public — as a VooMe, in the feed, for anyone to hear. And a messenger where it stays private: chats with friends, voice messages, groups. One account for both, one profile for both. This guide shows how the pieces fit together.
Most apps make you choose: either you chat with the people you know, or you post for the people who don't know you yet. VoiceApp does both, and the thing holding it together is your voice.
The public half is VooMe and Discover: you record a short audio meme, publish it to the feed, and it gets played, liked and passed along — by people you would never have run into otherwise. Public profiles and public groups are part of it too.
The private half is the messenger: one-to-one and group chats with text, voice messages and media. A soundbite too good for a single chat becomes a VooMe in two taps. And a VooMe only your friends would get doesn't go to the feed at all — it goes straight into the chat.
VoiceApp is developed and operated in Germany, by a single developer, with no venture capital and no corporation behind it. The story behind that is on About VoiceApp; how your data is handled is covered in the privacy & security guide.
VooMe is short for voice meme, and it's the heart of the app: a short audio post with its own title and cover image. Classic memes are images with text — a VooMe is a piece of sound. A joke, a hot take, a quote, a soundbite from your day, a small story in your own voice.
There are two ways to get one:
Where it goes is up to you: to the public feed, where anyone can discover it — or into a private chat, if it's an inside joke only your friends will get. VooMes you don't publish stay in the “My” tab, local to your device.
Recording tips, the import in detail and what makes a VooMe land are all in the VooMe guide.
If VooMe makes your voice public, Discover makes you public: it's where a chat app turns into a network. Two things live there.
You'll find people and communities you would never have run into otherwise — and they find you, if you want them to. You can see part of it right here on the website, without installing the app.
VooMe is social by design. Listeners can like your posts and pass them on — publicly in the feed or into their own chats. And you get notified when friends create, like or share a VooMe.
That's the difference between a feed and a broadcast tower: what you publish comes back to you. A VooMe someone shares into their circle of friends travels somewhere you could never have reached on your own — and the reaction to it finds its way back.
The other half of the app: one-to-one and group chats with text, voice messages, images, videos, GIFs, documents and audio files. Voice messages stand on equal footing with text here — record, send, listen in real time.
VooMes and chats aren't separate worlds: the VooMe picker in a chat works just like the photo picker. Pick a VooMe, send it, and your friends can play it, react to it and share it on without leaving the conversation.
What chats don't have: a conversation history in the cloud. Messages pass through the server only for as long as delivery takes, and are deleted there afterwards. The server is a courier, not an archive — your chats live on your devices. The details are in the privacy & security guide.
Since the whole app revolves around your voice anyway, you can also drive it entirely hands-free — handy while driving, cooking or out on a walk.
Dictate without confirming. The dictation button on your keyboard drops the recognised text into the input field — and then it's back to you: look down, check, tap send. VoiceApp doesn't stop there: tap the microphone icon, say your message, and it goes out as text straight away. No confirmation step, no glance at the screen. What arrives on the other end is a perfectly ordinary text message the recipient can read silently — in a meeting or on a train, without hunting for headphones.
Because it sends immediately, how you speak matters:
Have messages read aloud. The other direction: turn on Auto-read in the Android app and VoiceApp reads your unread incoming messages aloud — even while the app is in the background. Together with dictation, that adds up to a conversation that needs neither your hands nor your eyes.
The iPhone has no built-in read-aloud, because iOS won't let an app run in the background for it. What iOS does instead is read the notification itself: the feature is called Announce Notifications, and it reads incoming notifications aloud, including the ones from VoiceApp. Turn it on under Settings → Notifications → Announce Notifications and enable VoiceApp in the app list. It works with AirPods and other headphones, in CarPlay, and since iOS 16 through the speaker as well.
And when to use voice, when to use text? The rule of thumb: the more factual the content, the better text works — an address, a time, a yes/no answer is taken in at a glance. The more emotional or nuanced, the better voice works, because tone, warmth and irony travel with it and get lost in written words. A typed “sounds good” and a spoken “sounds good” can mean two completely different things.
VoiceApp is available for iOS (App Store) and Android (Google Play or as a direct APK download from this website). On top of that come the web client at web.voiceapp.me and the desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux.
On desktop and in the browser you sign in by scanning the QR code shown with the app on your phone — no second password needed. Your chats then appear on the big screen.
If recording or dictation doesn’t work, it’s almost always permissions: check that VoiceApp is allowed to use the microphone in your system settings (iOS: Settings → Privacy → Microphone; Android: Settings → Apps → VoiceApp → Permissions). If recordings sound muffled, check whether a Bluetooth headset is connected and using its microphone. And if playback or read-aloud stays silent, make sure the phone isn’t in silent mode with media volume down.
Anything else — write to hello@voiceapp.me and it lands directly with the developer.
Write to me at hello@voiceapp.me — feedback and questions go straight to the developer.