fieldmemo: keep the phone in your pocket, talk to it, get a field journal at home

Description and use

Fieldmemo turns walk‑time voice memos into an offline field journal, map layer, and CSV using Whisper and Gemma 4, without internet.

Problem

Walkers want to record observations without using a screen, and later generate a structured field journal, map layer, and CSV without internet.

Outcome

Fieldmemo converts walk‑time voice memos into a readable journal, a GIS track with memo pins, and a CSV of observations, all offline and without external APIs.

Workflow

• Record voice memos on the phone while walking.
• Export or copy the memos and GPX track to a local folder.
• Run fieldmemo <folder> --gpx <track.gpx> on the machine.
• The tool transcribes audio with Whisper, classifies content with Gemma 4 via Ollama, and generates journal.md, walk.geojson, and notes.csv.
• Review the outputs and adjust if needed.
• Use the files in QGIS, uMap, or a spreadsheet.

Evidence

fieldmemo turns the voice memos you record on a walk into a field journal, on your own machine, with no internet.

Source

At home you run one command on the folder of memos, plus the GPX track from your phone or watch if you recorded one: fieldmemo walks/2026-10-08/memos --gpx walks/2026-10-08/track.gpx

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It writes: journal.md, walk.geojson, notes.csv

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Everything runs on your own machine: speech-to-text with Whisper (through faster-whisper) and note-taking with Google's open-weight Gemma served by Ollama…

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The sample walk is synthetic… treat the accuracy here as a best case.

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