You can talk to Earwig now

Here's the thing I've wanted in Earwig since the very start, and it's finally in.

Picture the shoot. You're rolling, take after take, and the good one just happens. You feel it land. And that is the exact moment you're meant to reach for your phone and tap a marker. But your hands are on the camera, your eyes are on your subject, and reaching for the phone means breaking the thing you're trying to catch. So you tell yourself you'll remember it later. Now you have to look through your footage later to find that take.

That gap has nagged at me for a long time, so we closed it.

Earwig now has voice activation. You pick a word, "Earwig", "Great take", "cutaway" "fire", whatever feels natural in your mouth, and when the moment lands you just say it. Earwig drops a marker on the spot, stamped to timecode, hands-free. You never touch the phone.

It sounds like a small thing. On set it really isn't. The moments you most want to mark tend to be the most demanding ones, those are exactly the moments where fumbling for a screen costs you the shot. Now you stay in it. You call the take out loud and keep filming.

The part I didn't expect to love: it quietly kills the worst job in the edit. Every take you name is already sitting on your timeline when you open the project, in order, labelled, ready. No scrubbing back through hours of footage looking for the one you knew was good on the day. That is hours back on every single shoot.

One tip from how I actually use it: I run it through a Bluetooth earpiece. It hears my voice clean, even over a noisy room or a busy street, so it catches "cutaway" and not the traffic.

Setup takes about thirty seconds. Choose your word, switch it on, film.