Every few months a new AI voice to-do list app launches promising to finally fix the problem of thoughts that never make it onto your list. Foley, which launched on Product Hunt in October 2026, is the latest — and it caught my attention for one specific reason: instead of confidently filing whatever it heard, it asks you a question when it isn’t sure. Verdict up front: Foley is a genuinely well-thought-out voice task manager from a veteran engineer, with pricing that is refreshingly honest. But it is brand new, its AI depends on a model provider somewhere in the cloud, and you should go in with eyes open about privacy and longevity. Here is the full breakdown.
What Foley actually does
Foley is a voice-first task manager. You say what needs doing — one thing or several — and it turns your words into tasks with the project, due date and reminder already set. The capture flow is built around a “capture sheet”: you tap, talk, and let go. Foley then works out the tasks, dates and project before anything lands, shows you what it understood, and says the result out loud in a single sentence. What you said is always on the screen whether or not the voice plays.
The pitch, from maker José Airosa, a software engineer with more than 25 years of experience, is simple: he kept losing tasks he said out loud — mid-meeting, in the car, walking the dog — so he built the to-do list he wanted for that. Talk, and it files.
Beyond capture, Foley is a complete task manager. It has a daily desk where tasks from all your projects come together, a Timeline that groups what is overdue, due today and coming this week, a Plan tab where you can ask “What should I work on first?” and get an answer drawn from your actual list, projects organised into folders, simple checklists for shopping or packing, task context (notes, attachments, dependencies like “the invoice to Acme is blocked by the board deck”), a sharing feature for bringing people into projects, and a capture history that keeps your original words next to what Foley changed — with an undo if it got something wrong.
The “asks first” design: why it matters more than you think
Here is the detail that separates Foley from most voice capture tools — and from most AI products, honestly. The app’s rule is “a good question beats a bad guess.” When two tasks could fit, or a detail is genuinely ambiguous — two people called Sam, a project it hasn’t seen, a reminder set for “morning” with no actual time — Foley asks which one you mean instead of silently picking wrong.
The implementation details the maker shared are what convinced me this is real engineering rather than a demo trick. Foley reads the whole sentence before it files anything, and the last value you say wins: “Thursday, no wait, Friday” becomes one task on Friday. There is no extra confirm step for the normal case, because you already see what it understood on the capture sheet before the task lands, and you can fix it there. It only asks when it is truly unsure.
Even better: Foley does not trust the language model with your calendar. When it resolves a relative date like “next Tuesday”, the app checks the date in code against your device’s clock before saving. That is exactly the kind of unglamorous defensive engineering that matters in production, and it is the reason Foley’s maker can ship voice capture without the usual trail of mysteriously misfiled tasks. As an independent roundup of October’s AI launches put it: most voice tools “just dump whatever you said into a list” — Foley is trying to fix the actual failure mode.
Features in the current build
Walking through the official product tour and launch material, here is what you get today:
- Voice capture sheet: tap, speak, release. Say several things at once and Foley splits them into separate tasks with projects and times assigned.
- Clarification: targeted questions with suggested answers when the app is genuinely unsure. On the watch, the likely answers appear as tappable chips, and short answers are read back before anything is sent — smart, because short utterances are where speech recognition is least reliable.
- Timeline and daily desk: overdue, today, tomorrow and the week ahead in one view across every project. Plans change? Just say so and the task moves.
- Plan tab: ask it to plan your day around the tasks already on your list, then follow the plan back to the work and adjust as you go.
- Projects and folders: give each part of your life a home; folders group related projects, which hold the work and its context.
- Simple lists: shopping, packing, small reminders — checklists that stay checklists.
- Task context: notes, attachments and dependencies that explain what is holding things up.
- Capture history: your original words beside what Foley changed, with undo for bad captures.
- Sharing: share a project through your Foley account; tasks and comments stay with the work.
- Platforms: iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows and the web, plus Apple Watch (watchOS 10 or later) and Wear OS 3+ apps that do capture, questions and your day on the wrist.
Pricing: free tier versus Foley Pro
Foley’s pricing is refreshingly plain. The site’s own words: “Start with space. Add what you need. Desktop task management is free.”
- Free (desktop and web): a home for your tasks on your computer, no sign-in needed to start. To use the AI features on the free tier you bring your own personal AI key (OpenRouter) — and your AI provider charges for that usage, so it is not cost-free in practice.
- Foley Pro: $8 per month, with the first month at $4 (applied automatically at checkout). This gets you Foley-managed AI with no personal key to configure, plus your account across devices, sync and project sharing. The site notes website pricing, and that store prices may differ.
The free-with-your-own-key model is worth understanding before you judge it. On the free tier, you are paying OpenRouter’s token rates directly — a few cents per capture, most likely — but you also have to set the key up, and you are responsible for its security. Pro removes that friction and adds sync, which is genuinely required if you want the same list on your phone, watch and desk. For most people the real question is not $8 versus free; it is $8 versus the annoyance of key management and per-token billing.
Watch-outs and honest limitations
No October-2026 launch deserves a free pass, so here is the other side of the ledger — all verifiable, none speculative.
- It is brand new. Foley launched this month. There is no meaningful track record, almost no App Store review history, and no public information about the company behind it beyond its founder. Buying into a productivity tool is partly buying into its future; that future is unproven.
- Your voice goes through the cloud. An independent review of Foley’s launch notes that audio and selected task context can pass through OpenRouter to model providers, and that signed-in sync runs through Foley and Cloudflare without end-to-end encryption. The company deserves credit for publishing a detailed privacy disclosure — many don’t — but if you handle sensitive client data, read that policy before you dictate anything confidential.
- The free tier has hidden friction. “Bring your own AI key” means creating an OpenRouter account, funding it, pasting a key and guarding that key. That is fine for technical users and a real barrier for everyone else. It is also genuinely cheap per task, but “free” undersells the setup.
- The category is brutally crowded. Apple Reminders with Siri and Google Tasks with Gemini already do voice capture for free on the devices most people own. Foley’s advantages — cross-platform consistency, the clarification loop, planning from your list — have to earn the switch.
- Pricing is early. The maker notes store prices may differ from website pricing, and launch pricing on a weeks-old product should be treated as a starting offer, not a permanent promise.
Foley versus the alternatives
For most iPhone owners, the default comparison is Apple Reminders plus Siri: free, private, deeply integrated, and increasingly capable. Google Tasks plus Gemini plays the same role on Android. If your life already runs inside one ecosystem, neither is broken, and Foley has to earn the download.
Where Foley argues its case is cross-platform context. Reminders is Apple-only; Tasks is Google-only. If you work on Windows, switch between iPhone and a Windows laptop, or want the same list on a Wear OS watch and an iPad, the native tools fragment. Foley’s whole pitch is one list on every device, with the clarification layer on top. Its “asks first” behaviour is also genuinely ahead of Siri and Gemini, which tend to either guess or punt to a web search rather than ask one crisp follow-up.
The honest trade-off: native tools keep your data inside a trillion-dollar company’s privacy apparatus with on-device processing; Foley routes AI work through OpenRouter and syncs through its own infrastructure without end-to-end encryption. If privacy is your top criterion, the native tools still win. If cross-device voice capture with genuine intelligence is the criterion, Foley is the more interesting product today.
From our experience: the voice-capture failure mode nobody talks about
At MTD Technologies we build voice and chat interfaces for client products, so we have watched this exact problem from the inside. The failure mode of voice capture is not that it mishears you — speech recognition is excellent now. The failure mode is that it files the wrong thing with total confidence: the right words on the wrong project, the meeting notes turned into a task, the “call Sam” that picked the wrong Sam. And because it all happens silently, you discover the damage days later, when the task doesn’t exist where you expected it.
That is why Foley’s design instincts read well to us. Asking one good question at capture time is an order of magnitude cheaper than re-filing ten bad tasks later. Resolving dates in code instead of trusting the model is the kind of decision you only make after watching a model put something on the wrong Tuesday. And crucially, Foley does not ask every time — there is no extra confirm step for the routine case, because over-asking would murder the speed advantage that makes voice capture worth using at all. That balance, between speed and verification, is the whole game in this category.
Who should try it? People who think out loud for a living: field engineers, sales reps on the road, founders between meetings, anyone whose best ideas arrive while driving. If you already live happily in Apple Reminders or Google Tasks on a single platform, Foley is a curiosity rather than a necessity. And if you handle regulated or sensitive data by voice, wait for — or ask for — a clearer privacy story before making it your system of record.
Frequently asked questions
What is Foley?
Foley is an AI voice to-do list app launched in October 2026 by software engineer José Airosa. You speak your tasks, it files them with the project, due date and reminder already set, and it asks a clarifying question when it is unsure instead of guessing. It runs on iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows, the web, and Apple Watch / Wear OS.
How much does Foley cost?
Desktop and web task management is free with no account required, but AI features need your own OpenRouter API key (your provider charges for usage). Foley Pro costs $8 per month — $4 for the first month — and includes managed AI with no key to configure, plus cross-device sync and project sharing.
How is Foley different from Siri Reminders or Google Tasks?
Three differences: it works across all platforms with one synced list, it asks clarifying questions when a task is ambiguous instead of guessing, and its Plan tab answers “what should I work on first?” from your actual list. The trade-off is that the native tools keep more processing on-device, while Foley’s AI work goes through cloud model providers.
Is Foley private and secure?
Foley publishes a detailed privacy disclosure, which is better than most launches. The caveats: voice audio and selected task context can pass through OpenRouter to model providers, and signed-in sync runs through Foley’s infrastructure without end-to-end encryption. Read the full policy before dictating sensitive or client-confidential material.
Should my business use Foley?
For individuals and small teams who capture work by voice — field staff, sales, founders — it is worth the free tier test. For business-critical or sensitive workflows, wait for a longer track record and clearer enterprise privacy terms. If you need a custom voice-driven workflow built to your own privacy requirements, talk to us — it is the kind of system we build.
Foley is a promising start, not a proven system of record. The “asks first” design fixes the real failure mode of voice task capture, the pricing is honest, and the engineering details (whole-sentence reading, dates resolved in code, read-back on the watch) suggest a maker who has thought hard about where these tools actually break. The open questions — longevity, privacy posture, whether the Pro price holds — are the normal ones for a weeks-old product. Try the free tier, keep your sensitive data elsewhere for now, and watch this space. For more tools in this space, browse our AI tools directory, and if you want AI capture wired into your own operations, see how we approach workflow automation.