Building Todoist Ramble: How Doist Turned Voice Braindumps into Real-Time Task Capture
Podcast: Just Now PossiblePublished On: Thu Apr 16 2026
Description: How do you turn a rambling stream of consciousness into a clean task list — while the person is still talking? That's the core challenge Doist solved with Ramble, a voice-to-task feature inside Todoist that uses live audio AI to capture tasks in real time, no transcription step required. In this episode of Just Now Possible, Teresa Torres talks with Ernesto Garcia (Front-end Product Engineer), Thomas Jost (Backend Software Engineer), and Hugo Fauquenoi (Product Manager) from Doist about how they built Ramble — Todoist's first pure AI feature. What started as a two-to-three month AI exploration phase became one of the most technically deliberate features they've shipped: a Gemini-powered pipeline that makes tool calls while the user is still speaking, surfacing tasks on screen in real time without any text output from the model. You'll hear how they designed around the "brain dump" behavior they found in user research, why they chose direct context injection over RAG for project and label matching, the surprising complexity of date handling in a live audio pipeline, and how they built a multi-language eval system using real employee recordings across 35 countries. It's a detailed look at the discipline of keeping AI features simple, constrained, and genuinely useful.
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