Abrège was born of frustration.

Hi, I'm Mark. I'm the creator of Abrège.

Like a lot of people, I was getting WhatsApp voice notes all day long. From family, friends, sometimes for work. And every time, the same irritated reflex: having to stop everything, get my earphones out or turn up the volume, and listen to someone talk for five minutes only to, in the end, ask whether I was free on Saturday.

The worst was the moments when I couldn't listen: in a meeting, on transport, at the table. The voice notes piled up, I felt guilty for not replying, and when I finally listened, the important bit was drowned in three minutes of digressions.

One day, I'd had enough. I told myself there had to be a simple way to know what a voice note contained without listening to it in full. Not a raw 800-word transcription to read, no: a real summary, that gets to the point, right inside WhatsApp, with no app to install.

That's how Abrège was born. At first, it was just for me. Then I realised this problem affected a huge number of people, often far more harshly than me.

A tool that helps more than I imagined

By sharing Abrège, I discovered uses I hadn't thought of. Hard-of-hearing people who, for the first time, could follow their family's voice notes without depending on someone. Relatives of older people making their lives easier. People with tinnitus who could finally rest their ears.

What started as a fix for my personal annoyance turned out to be, for some, a genuine accessibility tool. It's become an important part of what I want Abrège to be: a tool that makes WhatsApp usable by everyone, whatever their situation.

What I believe in

Abrège rests on a few simple principles I hold to.

Simplicity. No app to install, no account to create, no file to upload to a dodgy site. Everything happens in WhatsApp, the tool you already use. You forward a voice note, you get a summary. That's it.

Respect for your privacy. The audio file is deleted immediately after processing, and our servers are hosted in Europe. Transcription goes through OpenAI's API, which states it doesn't train its models on data sent via its API. These aren't marketing promises, it's how Abrège is built technically.

Honesty. Abrège isn't right for everything. For an important, emotional message, hearing the person's voice is irreplaceable. Abrège is made for the practical, the organisational, the informational, where what matters is the information, not the tone.

And now?

Abrège is a project I grow step by step, listening to feedback from the people who use it. If you have an idea, a criticism, a particular use you'd like to tell me about, I read everything. You can reach me directly, in fact, it's still me who replies.

Thanks for taking the time to discover the project. And if endless voice notes annoy you as much as they annoyed me, you now know there's a solution.