Your shopping list now takes dictation

The first time I tested voice input in my kitchen, I said “Adaugă mazăre în listă” — add peas to the list — and Listo proudly created an item called “A dauga mazare in lista.” Punctuation included. My shopping list contained one item, and that item was a sentence. I'd like to tell you I laughed; mostly I opened my laptop.

Months of kitchen testing later, this feature is the one I now use more than typing. You tap the mic, you talk the way you'd talk to a person standing next to the fridge, and the right things land on the right list. “Add two bottles of milk from Lidl.” “I think we're out of toilet paper.” “Put chips on the Friday party list.” No keywords, no robot grammar — Listo picks out the items, the amounts, the store, and which list you meant, in any of the app's ten languages.

What happens when you talk to it

Two very different things, and it's worth knowing which is which. First, your speech becomes text — that's speech recognition, and it happens entirely on your phone. Second, that text becomes list items — “two bottles of milk, from the store called Lidl, onto Saturday's list” — and that's understanding, which happens on Listo's server, because honestly, understanding “I think we're out of toilet paper” takes more intelligence than fits in a grocery app.

Listo then reads back what it understood — out loud, if you let it — and asks one question at most: which list? Say “yes”, say “the last one”, say “a new list called weekend”. Done. Phone never left your pocket-to-ear distance; flour never touched the screen.

The part I'm proudest of: it learns from being wrong

Speech recognition mishears. Accents, kitchen noise, my own mumbling — sometimes “mazăre” comes out as something no dictionary has met. When that happens, Listo doesn't confidently add nonsense to your list; it shows you what it heard and lets you fix it before anything is saved.

And here's the trick: the fix teaches it. Correct a garbled word once, and Listo remembers what you meant next time. When enough different people fix the same mishearing the same way, the correction quietly becomes automatic for everyone speaking that language. My Romanian corrections make the app better for speakers of Romanian; a stranger's German corrections make it better in Berlin. The app I shipped is the worst version of it that will ever exist.

Honest print, before you tap the mic

Voice input is part of Listo Premium, like receipt scanning — the understanding step runs on serious AI, and serious AI costs real money per sentence. It also needs an internet connection to do the understanding, so offline the mic politely tells you it can't listen right now. And it will still mishear things sometimes; the review step exists precisely so that a bad transcription costs you two seconds, not a wasted trip for a phantom ingredient.

Try it

1. Update Listo, then open Settings → Voice input and turn on Use speech to text. There's a one-time language-pack download — WiFi recommended.
2. On the lists screen, tap the mic in the top bar and just say what you need — items, amounts, store, target list, all optional, any order.
3. Confirm with your voice (“yes” / “new list”) — or fix a misheard word on the review screen and know you've just made the app smarter for everyone.

Voice input is live today on Android and iOS. If it mishears something spectacular — and it will, at least once — I genuinely want to see it: support@rolisto.com. I read every message, and half of Listo's best behavior started as one of them.

— Andrei