Why I built voice commands into a dashcam app
Last summer, a Lyft driver in Manchester rang us. She'd been hit at a traffic light, and the other driver claimed she'd run the red. The Hawk evidence was crystal clear, but what struck me wasn't the footage itself. It was her first sentence: 'Thank God I didn't have to take my hands off the wheel to save it.'
The moment we realised tapping wasn't enough
You don't think about this until someone describes the panic of an accident. Your heart's pounding. There's a queue of traffic behind you. Your hands are white on the steering wheel. The last thing you need is a UI to navigate.
When we first launched Hawk, the core was solid: continuous recording, cryptographic hashing on every clip, biometric evidence locker. But we kept getting the same feedback from drivers doing this for work. One tap to save was better than nothing. But one tap still means looking at your phone.
Rideshare drivers told us they'd miss incidents entirely because they were concentrating on the road, or their hands were full. A delivery driver in Leeds mentioned he'd been in three small collisions over six months, and twice he'd fumbled the phone and missed the save window. The third time, a passenger helped him.
We sat with that for a while. What was the point of building evidence-grade features if drivers couldn't reliably capture what mattered?
Voice commands as a safety layer, not a shortcut
Siri Shortcuts integration wasn't a feature request we could ignore. It solved a real problem: your eyes stay on the road, your hands stay on the wheel, and your evidence gets saved.
The technical side was clean. We integrated voice-save commands so that saying 'Hey Siri, save incident' or custom phrases triggers an immediate save to your Evidence Locker. It clips the current moment, writes the SHA-256 hash, and locks it behind biometric auth, all without you touching the screen.
What surprised us was how drivers used it. One commuter in Edinburgh told us he uses voice saves not just for near-misses, but for timestamps. 'I say it when I see dangerous driving upstream, even if nothing's happened yet. The GPS overlay and time stamp prove when I saw it.' That's not something we'd designed for, but it's valid evidence logic.
The Rideshare Pro tier includes this by default now. We learned pretty quickly that if you're running shift mode for multi-trip sessions, you need hands-free control. You're switching between cabin camera and road camera. You're managing passenger notices. Voice commands aren't a convenience; they're part of the job.
The integration nobody talks about until they need it
Here's what I've noticed: voice commands matter most on the day you need them. Most drivers go weeks without an incident. Then something happens. A close call. A clip that might matter for insurance or a small-claims case. At that moment, the difference between fumbling for the screen and saying a phrase feels enormous.
We built this into Shortcuts so it works with other automations too. Some drivers set up a shortcut that saves an incident AND sends a quick message to their spouse with a location pin. One taxi driver in Bristol uses a custom phrase that saves the clip and immediately opens his insurance company's claims app. It's not magic. It's just letting the phone do the boring parts while you focus on driving.
The dispute export is where voice saves earn their keep anyway. When you export a clip you saved by voice, it's a one-tap ZIP file with your SHA-256 manifest, GPS overlay, and trip map. Insurance companies and police see evidence-grade integrity. The timestamp proves you flagged it in real time, not three months later when you need it.
Why this matters more than the app ever will
I think the real story here isn't about Hawk. It's about what happens when you design for the moment nobody wants to be in. We could have shipped continuous recording, called it a day, and moved on to marketing. Plenty of apps do that.
But drivers kept telling us the same thing: 'I was shaken. I wasn't thinking clearly. I needed this to be automatic.' So we built around that. Voice commands, biometric locks, export manifests that would hold up in court. Not because it sounded clever. Because we'd heard it matter.
The free tier gives you 10 clips a month and seven-day retention. Local Pro is £3.99 a month or £39.99 a year, and it lifts those limits and adds the voice commands. Rideshare Pro includes cabin camera and shift mode for multi-trip drivers. But honestly, the tier you choose matters less than whether you actually use the evidence locker when something happens.
Next time you're driving and someone cuts you off, ask yourself: would you remember to save that clip if your hands were already full? That's the question we're trying to solve.