Untold Journal App Review

Untold is a voice journaling app from Thoughts ACC, Inc., built around talking instead of typing and a library of AI "Perspectives" pulled from psychology, art and spirituality. This Untold journal app review is based on a direct read of Untold's own marketing page and privacy policy on 11 September 2026, plus its current App Store listing, not on a press kit. What follows is what it actually says about itself, where that holds up, and three apps worth checking instead, Murmr included.

What is Untold, exactly?

You talk, or type if you would rather; the site calls this a stream-of-consciousness, voice-first experience with writing as the fallback. While you are journaling, Untold asks optional follow-up questions to push the entry further. Afterward you get a "Perspective": a short response written through one of more than a dozen named lenses, among them Cognitive Restructuring, Positive Psychology, Acceptance and Commitment, A Psychological Perspective, Ancient Wisdom, Fast Gratitude, A Poem for Your Thoughts, and, for reasons the site does not explain, a recipe recommendation called This Week's Recipe.

There is also Ask Your Entries, which answers a question in your own words using your past entries, a Visual Trends screen for recurring themes over time, and a set of AI-generated audio pieces built from what you wrote: a daily meditation, a progressive muscle relaxation, a bedtime meditation, a "morning manifestation," and a sleep story, each with a pickable narrator and background track.

Untold ships as a native iPhone app and a companion web app, linked from its own marketing site. Nothing on the site or in its privacy policy mentions Android.

What does Untold do with what you say?

The marketing page states this plainly: "All of your entries are encrypted. We never see your journal data. Your journal is yours to own, export, or delete at any time." Reading past that page to the privacy policy itself is where the picture gets more specific, and less tidy.

Search Untold's privacy policy for the word "encrypted" and you will not find it. What the policy does say is that personal information, which it defines to include journal content, may be shared with "third-party generative AI providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Hume" to power features like the Perspectives and the meditations. Hume is worth naming on its own: it specializes in reading emotion from voice, which matters for an app built around talking rather than typing. Two commitments in the same policy are real and worth crediting: your data will not be sold, and it will not be used to train third-party AI models unless you opt in. A headline claim of "encrypted" and a legal policy naming three outside AI vendors are two different stories about the same product, and only one of them was written by lawyers.

Where Untold is genuinely good

The follow-up questions are the best idea in the app. Most voice journals record and transcribe and stop there; asking one more question while you are still talking is a small mechanic that makes the entry longer and more specific without you having to plan it. Ask Your Entries is the second strong idea: turning a folder of past recordings into something you can query in plain language is exactly the point of transcribing in the first place, and a lot of competitors never build that part.

Real numbers back this up better than marketing copy could: the App Store listing shows 4.9 stars from roughly 2,200 ratings as of this review, a strong showing for a journaling app at that volume, not a handful of five-star reviews from launch week.

Where the review turns critical

Three things would make me hesitate before recommending Untold without a caveat.

The privacy gap above is the biggest one: say what the AI touches in the same sentence you say "encrypted," or drop the word.

The second is the framing on some of the Perspectives. Cognitive Restructuring and Acceptance and Commitment are named directly after two specific forms of therapy, offered here as an automated response to a diary entry with no therapist attached to either side of it. That may be exactly what some users want: a taste of a technique they cannot otherwise access. It is also the kind of naming a plainer product would avoid, because a person journaling through something serious can read "Cognitive Restructuring" as more clinically grounded than an AI-generated paragraph actually is.

The third is the price, or the absence of one. Nothing on untoldapp.com states what a subscription costs, and the number is not visible from a plain fetch of the App Store listing either; it only appears once you are inside the app's own paywall. Compare that to a journal that shows its price before you have handed over a single entry, and the difference is not subtle.

Untold or something else?

Is Untold worth it? That depends on which of four apps answers the same four questions the way you need them answered: does it talk back with something more than a transcript, what happens to the recording, what does it cost, and who should skip it.

	Follow-up / AI depth	What happens to what you say	Cost	Wrong for
Untold	Deepest: live follow-up questions, Perspectives, generated meditations	Sent to OpenAI, Anthropic and Hume to power those features; never sold, never used for model training without opt-in	Free to install; subscription price shown only inside the app	Anyone who wants the price up front, or who is wary of therapy-named AI features
Murmr	A ten-second mind and body check-in plus five on-tap lenses (Gratitude, Reframe, Coach, Summarise, Patterns) and trends over weeks	Entry text sent to Google's Gemini to transcribe and, if you tap a lens, to reflect on; each AI feature switches off separately	Free; optional Plus, price shown before you pay	Anyone who wants a therapy-branded Perspective library or a decade of import history
Day One	Minimal: it is a typed diary first, with voice as an add-on	Not stated on the vendor's own site	Silver $49.99/yr, Gold $74.99/yr	Anyone who wants a free, voice-first app and does not already have years of entries to protect
DailyVox	None beyond transcription	On the device; no third-party AI at all	Free, open-source	Anyone who wants Untold's depth of AI response or a mood layer

If a rich, guided response to every entry is what you are after and you are comfortable with three named AI vendors reading the text to give it to you, Untold is the most built-out option here. If you would rather see the price before you start, or want fewer hands on the transcript, Murmr and DailyVox both show their terms up front, in different ways: DailyVox by keeping everything on the device, Murmr by naming the one AI provider it uses and letting each feature built on it be switched off. Day One is the one to pick if voice was never really the point and you already have years of typed entries to bring with you.

For the wider field beyond these four, the full comparison of voice journaling apps checks eight vendors on the same six questions, and if the trade you keep circling back to is talking versus typing rather than any one app, voice journaling versus writing goes through what the research actually says about each mode.

Murmr shows its price before you start and asks for nothing but a minute of talking. See what a check-in looks like