Voice memos
Two coaches asked for the same thing in the same month: a way to leave a client a few spoken words without handing over a personal phone number. Voice memos now live in every Grove message thread. Record, listen back, and send; your client can play it, read the automatic transcript instead, or reply in their own voice from the web app. Sage never hears what is said in a voice memo, nothing reminds you to send one, and the audio is deleted 90 days after it is sent.
Voice memos
Two coaches asked for this in the same month, independently, and neither of them asked for a feature. One had a client she wanted to reach with a quick “thinking of you, how is the week going” between sessions. The other gets voice notes from her own coach over WhatsApp, loves them, and did not want to give her clients her personal number to do the same. What they wanted was their voice in the client’s week, inside the place the coaching already happens.
So a voice memo is a message, not a file. There is a Voice memo button beside the message box: record, listen back, re-record if it came out wrong, add an optional line of text so your client knows what it is about, and send. It lands in the same thread as everything else, with a waveform, a speed control, and a New marker until it has been played. Clients can answer in kind from the Grove web app.
Every memo is transcribed after it sends, and both of you see the same text, so a client on a bus can read it instead. That transcript goes back into the thread and nowhere else. When the design went to one of the coaches who asked for it, she said voice memos should stay between the coach and the client and not go into AI, and that is how it shipped: Sage knows a memo was sent and how long it was, and never what was said.
Two more decisions worth naming. Voice memos are off until you allow them, and Grove asks the first time you press record, telling you plainly that the audio is stored for 90 days and then deleted. And there is nothing that nudges you to send them: no reminders, no streaks, no counters. If a weekly memo is part of how you coach, that rhythm is yours.