Notebook Video & Audio Messages — Right From Your Phone

There's a particular kind of information that doesn't fit in a document. The reason behind a decision. The tone you'd want your kids to hear it in. The thirty seconds of context that turns "here is the safe deposit box key" into "here is the safe deposit box key, and here's why I gave it to your aunt and not your uncle."

You can type that. But some things land better when your family can actually hear your voice — or see your face — instead of reading a paragraph that sounds like a legal memo.

So we made notebook entries do more than text. Every entry in a Killswitch notebook can now be a video message or an audio message, recorded right where the rest of your estate plan already lives. And we rebuilt the whole recording experience on mobile while we were at it.

Three kinds of entry, one notebook

A notebook is the narrative layer of your plan — the place where the story lives alongside the files. Until now, that story was text. Now each entry can be one of three things:

Text — the written notes you're used to.
Audio message — tap the microphone, talk, save. Good for the things that are easier to say than to write.
Video message — tap the camera, record, save. For the moments that deserve a face and a voice.

They sit side by side in the same notebook, in whatever order you put them. A text entry explaining where the will is, followed by a ninety-second video telling your family why you set things up the way you did, followed by an audio note for your business partner. One notebook, three formats, one story.

Still zero-knowledge — the recording never leaves your device in the clear

This is the part that matters, and it's the part most apps quietly skip.

When you record a video or audio message in Killswitch, the file is encrypted in your browser, on your device, before a single byte is uploaded. The recording is sealed with a key derived from your master key (AES-256-GCM), and only the encrypted blob travels to storage. Even the title of the entry is encrypted on your device before it's sent.

We never see the video. We never see the audio. We never see the title. The server stores opaque ciphertext and routes it to the right people when the time comes — and it couldn't play back a second of it if it tried. That's the same wrapped-master-key architecture behind every other Killswitch feature, now extended to the moment you hit "record."

If you want the full cryptographic walkthrough, we wrote one: how we built a zero-knowledge deadman switch.

A real recorder, especially on your phone

A microphone button is easy. A recorder that feels good to use on a phone is not — and recording a heartfelt message to your family is exactly the moment you don't want to be fighting a clumsy interface.

So the capture experience is now full-screen and iPhone-style: you tap to record, you get a clean, undistracted view of yourself (or a simple waveform for audio), and you save when you're done. No tiny embedded box, no guessing whether it's recording. It's the interaction you already know from your phone's camera, pointed at the one recording that actually matters.

The mobile notebook, rebuilt

The recorder was the headline, but it rode in with a broader mobile refresh of the notebook editor and the app shell around it:

A smoother notebook editor on mobile — writing and editing entries on a phone no longer feels like an afterthought.
A bottom navigation bar that matches the slide-out menu, so Home, Documents, Notes, Recordings, and Notebooks are always one tap away.
Respecting the hardware — the layout now accounts for the notch and the safe areas at the top and bottom of modern phones, so nothing important hides behind a camera cutout or a home indicator.

The goal is simple: the phone in your pocket should be a perfectly good place to add to your plan, not a downgraded version of the desktop app. Most people will record their first video message on a phone. It should feel like the app was built for that.

What this is good for

A few of the messages people are already leaving:

The "why," not just the "what." Your documents say what to do. A thirty-second video says why — and that context is often what prevents the family argument.

The things you'd never write down. It's easier to say "I love you, and I'm sorry we didn't talk more" than to type it into a text field. Audio lowers that bar.

Instructions that need a tone of voice. "Don't sell the house right away" reads as cold. Said out loud, it's reassurance.

Proof it's really you. A face and a voice are a kind of authentication that a typed note can't match — your family knows it's you, in your words, not something assembled after the fact.

Every one of these entries lives inside a notebook that's attached to your deadman switch, encrypted end to end, and delivered to the right people automatically if you stop checking in. The message waits, sealed, until it's needed — and not a moment before.

Go leave one

Open any notebook, add an entry, and tap the microphone or the camera. The first one is the hardest. It's also the one your family will be most glad you recorded.

— Jacob

Your Voice in the Notebook: Video & Audio Messages, Right From Your Phone