Every way in
A capture tool you have to go and find is a capture tool you stop using. So there are a lot of front doors, and they all land in the same Inbox.
The test for any of these is the same: from thought to caught, without breaking what you were doing. If a route makes you unlock, hunt and wait, it has failed, however clever it is.
Typing and talking
Open Edmund and the cursor is already waiting. Type the thought and save. Or tap the mic and say it, which is faster and usually the better idea when you’re walking, driving or holding something in your other hand. Transcription happens on your device, so your voice doesn’t go anywhere.
Dictation stops on its own after a couple of seconds of silence, so you don’t have to reach back for a stop button. Say the thing, put the phone down, it’s caught. If you’ve got half a dozen things at once rather than one, that’s what brain dump is for.
Siri, hands free
Say “Edmund note” and Siri will ask what you want to capture. There’s also “Edmund capture” and “New Edmund note” if one of those sits better in your mouth.
Worth knowing why the phrasing is a bit stiff: Edmund is a person’s name, and Siri hands anything that sounds like “Add to…” or “Tell…” to its own built-in apps first. “Tell Edmund” genuinely tries to text somebody called Ed. Leading with the app name is the only phrasing Siri reliably gives to us, so that’s what we ask for.
The Action button and widgets
On an iPhone with an Action button you can point it at Edmund and go from a locked phone to a live capture in one press, which is about as close to frictionless as the hardware allows. Widgets do the same job from the Home or Lock Screen, including one that drops you straight into voice capture.
The share sheet
Anything you can share, you can send to Edmund: a link, a paragraph you’ve selected, a photo, a PDF. Hit share, pick Edmund, and it lands in the Inbox to be triaged like anything you typed.
Share a page from Safari and the page title comes with it. Share a bare link from somewhere that doesn’t offer a title, and Edmund fetches the page’s title itself, so you don’t open your Inbox to a note that reads as a string of characters. You can switch that off under Settings ▸ Data ▸ Look up link titles.
Apple Watch
Raise your wrist, tap the complication, talk. It’s the one that gets used in the situations you can’t reach a phone at all: mid-walk, mid-washing-up, halfway up a ladder. The note travels to your phone and triages there, since the watch hasn’t the horsepower for the AI.
On the Mac
There’s a menu-bar icon for a quick capture without leaving what you’re in, and a global ⌥⌘E shortcut that brings up the capture window from anywhere at all, including full-screen apps. ⌘N works inside the app itself.
They all end up in the same place
Whichever door you came through, the note lands in your Inbox, gets triaged, and waits for you to confirm it. Nothing is filed away or sent onward off the back of a capture. That’s deliberate: capture has to be thoughtless to be worth having, so the thinking all happens later, in one place, when you’re ready.
Next: what happens to a note after you save it, or back to Help.