iOS shortcut to record voice memos and transcribe them to Obsidian

December 31, 2021

This workflow allows you to hold the lock button off your iPhone, say “dictate” and then dictate a note with the transcribed text being directly linked to your obsidian daily note. In fact these sentences were dictated using this shortcut :)

Setup

Create new iOS Shortcut (or copy mine here)
- Dictate Text
- Text
  - one new line
- Append to File
  - Append “Dictated text space Text” to file path Current Date ¹
Go to settings and change Siri settings to trigger on side button

On your Mac/Windows, go to the iCloud folder where Shortcuts saves files
- located in /Users/<username>/Library/Mobile\ Documents/iCloud~is~workflow~my~workflows/Documents/
Symlink this folder into your Obsidian Vault
- open terminal and run ln -s <path to of your Obsidian vault>
Install the plugin txt as md to open .txt files directly in Obsidian ²
Create a template that directly links the text file with transcribed notes to your daily note for a given day
- e.g. using Templater I include this line in my daily note template: [[Documents/Memos/<% tp.date.now() %>.txt]]]]

Using Append to file instead of Save to file prevents creating new files for each recording. Triggering the shortcut for the first time on a given day will still create a new txt file with the transcribed text but for all subsequent recordings on the same day, the transcribed text will be appended to the already existing file. Appending Dictated Text and Text (with a new line in it) will create a new line after every transcribed block. ↩︎
I didn’t figure out how to make the iOS shortcut save the transcribed text as markdown. There’s an option to save as rich text but the resulting file was still .txt for me. There’s another shortcut building block called “Convert rich text to markdown” but applying it afterwards didn’t help, instead, it just yielded a .txt with a markdown image link in it -.- ↩︎