Questions and answers

FOLKO is a personal CRM built around voice notes. After you meet someone, you record what they told you; FOLKO transcribes it, pulls out the facts, and later answers questions about your network — including about people you have not met yourself, because your contacts mentioned them. The database is on your phone.

Because speech recognition on the phone is not good enough in Lithuanian — that was tested, not guessed, and the trade-off was deliberate. The server does one job: it holds the API keys, so they are not compiled into an app that anyone can unpack. The recording is sent and transcribed, and we write no copy of it anywhere. The transcription step never sees your contacts. A question is different: it sends the names and facts of your people with the question, and the server keeps none of it.

Which is exactly why we don’t say “everything happens on your phone”. If that is not acceptable to you, this is the wrong app, and it is better to find out now.

It stays on your phone, because that is where it already is. Nothing that is recorded disappears if we disappear — what would stop working is recording and search, because both need models we don’t run ourselves. The app would become a database you can read and not add to, which is not nothing, and not what you paid for either.

And you can take it with you: Create a backup writes every table into one ZIP file, as JSON, and saves it to a folder you choose — off the phone, if you like. There is no audio in it: audio is deleted once a note is saved, and the transcript is what is kept.

Because a notes app is free to write into and worth nothing to search. What €11.99 buys is the answer, and the answer costs money every time: transcription runs on somebody’s servers, and so does the model that reads the question. That is also why it is a subscription rather than a purchase — you would pay once and the cost would keep running, and a product with that shape either raises the price later or dies.

And plainly: one warm introduction a year pays for it. If you meet three people a month, it doesn’t, and you should keep using the notes app. That is not a sales technique.

Yes. FOLKO comes to the App Store and Google Play on the same day, 4 November.

You are not recording the conversation — you are recording yourself afterwards, saying what you remember, which is the same sentence you would have written in a notebook and didn’t. The other half of the answer is less comfortable: what you were told about a third person is that person’s data, and you are the one holding it. The rule is simpler than the law. Don’t write down anything you wouldn’t repeat to their face.

A CRM records a deal; this records a sentence about a person who will never be a deal. Somebody’s brother, a former colleague, a partner in Warsaw — you could not enter them in a CRM if you wanted to, because there is no email address, often no company and sometimes no surname. These are different objects, not two interfaces onto the same one, and that is why both can be open at once.

On the fifteen recordings it was measured on: 0% invented facts. That was measured separately from everything else, because a missed fact is annoying and an invented one is dangerous — six months on, it reads as true. Three things keep it that way: nothing enters the database until you confirm it on the review screen, the original transcript stays on your phone so you can always reread what you said, and every record carries the version that made it.

Partly. The test recordings are written in spoken register — with the “ehm”, the restarts and the changes of mind mid-sentence — and read out loud, two of them deliberately fast. Foreign names and company names are in them on purpose. What they are not is a loud room, and the honest limit is fifteen recordings and one speaker: it shows the approach works, not that it works for everyone.

Yes. FOLKO has no accounts, no login and no password. Contacts, notes and transcripts live in local storage on the device; the audio of a note is kept there only until the note is saved. The only thing that leaves the phone is the audio of a recording, which is sent for transcription and fact extraction, and the facts a question needs to be answered.

Lithuanian and English work today; Spanish and Dutch are planned. Transcription detects the language on its own. Search works across inflected forms, which is the part that matters in Lithuanian: a note that said “Klaipėdoje” is found by a question about “Klaipėda”. The measurements were made on twelve Lithuanian and three English recordings.

A sales CRM stores what you entered about your own contacts. LinkedIn stores the digital graph. FOLKO stores what people told you out loud — the part that is written down nowhere else. “His brother handles contracts in Klaipėda” does not exist in any API, and it is the sentence that answers the question.

LinkedIn’s version of who-knows-whom is public and symmetrical, and it is better than ours at telling you that a connection exists. It cannot tell you why the connection is worth using, which is the only part you can act on.

No, and not soon. There are no accounts, so there is nothing to share between and no one to share with. If that is the thing you need, this is the wrong app today — and worth saying so, because a personal referral network being one person’s is a feature for some people and a blocker for others.

The plan is a free tier — twenty contacts with no time limit and thirty questions a month — and then €11.99 a month or €99 a year. Nobody is charged yet, and it is planned rather than final: the price is decided, the billing is not built, and the free limits are not in the app either.

Yes. Settings → Create a backup writes one ZIP file with every table as JSON, transcripts included, and saves it to a folder you pick — Downloads, an SD card, or a cloud drive that shows up in Android’s picker. There is no audio in it, because audio is deleted once a note is saved. The same file restores into FOLKO, merged with what is there or replacing it. The backup is made only when you make it, and the file is not encrypted. Deleting everything in one action works too.

From the App Store on iPhone and Google Play on Android, both from 4 November. There is nothing to sign up for before then, and no account to create after.