Spokenword

I'm a slam poet. Spokenword is the app I needed and couldn't find.

That sounds small. It isn't. Every slam poet knows the moment when you've lost track of the clock and you can feel the penalty ticking. This app was built from that single, simple concept. The timer doesn't just count down — it shifts through colour zones as your window closes, fires progressive haptic cues so you feel the pressure without looking at the screen, and gives you a grace period so you know exactly how deep into penalty you've gone.

The version problem came next. I perform the same poem in different contexts: three minutes for a slam, two minutes for rapid-fire, with stanzas removed or added depending on the emotional arc I want to share that night. Each version needs its own identity, its own rehearsal history, its own notes. And after a performance, you have maybe five minutes before the memory starts fading. What landed, what didn't, what you changed in the moment without thinking. I needed to capture that before it was gone.

That got me thinking: could I bring data analytics to rehearsal? I wanted to record runs, play them back, and actually compare them. Not just listen, but understand: am I saying this the same way each time, or differently? Where do I rush? Where do I drift?

That whole feature set — the pause maps, the consistency scores, the transcript diff — all of it runs entirely on-device. No data leaves your device. Ever.

The annotation system came from the same place. Sheet music tells a musician where to breathe, where to swell, where to pull back.

I wanted that for spoken word. Add a line comment mid-rehearsal to capture a thought in the moment. And when you record a run, you want to know: did you actually execute those marks, or did you perform a different poem to the one you planned?

The learning aspect is the one I feel most strongly about. I was never taught rhetoric at school. I still couldn't have named most of the techniques I was using. But I was using them, instinctively, every time I performed: anaphora, tricolon, volta. What this app can do is name them, show you where they live in your own work, and give you the language to deploy them deliberately. You layer the techniques, you see what you're building, and you get better at doing it on purpose.

There's also the question of scale. Imagine a prolific poet with hundreds of poems across years of work — organised into collections, importable from any text file, exportable and backed up on your own terms. Your work is yours. Nothing gets lost.

Built for slam poets, spoken word artists, performance poets, and storytellers.

One-time purchase. No account. No cloud. No subscription. Your work stays on your device, always.

"Spokenword is a vehicle for learning. I hope it supports your journey the way building it has supported mine."