Voice Notes in Obsidian — QuickSay for Windows
Obsidian has no built-in voice input. QuickSay lets you capture thoughts by voice directly into your vault — fast, clean, and private.
Obsidian users build personal knowledge bases that grow over months and years. Daily notes, fleeting thoughts, project logs, reading highlights, and interconnected ideas all live in the vault. The common bottleneck is input speed: the moment between having a thought and getting it into a note. QuickSay shortens that gap to seconds by adding voice-to-text to every Obsidian note, with LLaMA cleanup that turns spoken fragments into clean Markdown-ready prose.
Capture Thoughts at the Speed of Speech
The Zettelkasten and "second brain" methodologies depend on capturing ideas before they evaporate. Typing is often too slow — by the time you have opened a note and started writing, half the thought is gone. With QuickSay, you open your daily note, hold the hotkey, and speak. The cleaned text appears at your cursor in under two seconds. A fleeting insight that would have been lost becomes a permanent note.
Spoken into a daily note:
"interesting connection between the spaced repetition research from yesterday and the active recall paper I read this morning both suggest that retrieval practice is more effective than re-reading need to create a literature note linking these two sources"
After QuickSay cleanup:
"Interesting connection between the spaced repetition research from yesterday and the active recall paper I read this morning. Both suggest that retrieval practice is more effective than re-reading. Need to create a literature note linking these two sources."
Daily Notes and Journaling
Many Obsidian users maintain a daily notes practice — recording thoughts, reflections, and tasks at the start or end of each day. Voice dictation transforms journaling from a 15-minute typing session into a 5-minute speaking session. Open your daily note template, speak your reflections, and let QuickSay handle punctuation and formatting. The lower friction makes it easier to maintain the habit consistently.
Literature Notes and Reading Highlights
After reading an article, book chapter, or research paper, summarizing your takeaways in Obsidian solidifies understanding. But the effort of typing a summary often means highlights sit in a read-later app indefinitely. QuickSay lets you dictate summaries in your own words — speak your reaction to a passage, describe how it connects to existing notes, and capture the core argument. The result is a genuine literature note, not just a highlighted quote.
Works with Every Community Plugin
Obsidian's power comes from its plugin ecosystem — Dataview, Templater, Calendar, Kanban, and hundreds more. QuickSay does not interfere with any of them. Because it operates at the system level and pastes via the clipboard, it works in every text input that Obsidian or its plugins provide. Dictate into Kanban card descriptions, Calendar daily notes, or the command palette search bar.
Vault Privacy
Obsidian users often choose it specifically for its local-first, privacy-respecting approach — notes stored as Markdown files on your machine, not in someone else's cloud. QuickSay aligns with this philosophy. Your audio is sent to Groq for transcription, but QuickSay captures zero screen content, collects zero telemetry, and has no access to your vault files. The only data that leaves your machine is the audio clip you record, and nothing about your note structure, file names, or vault content is ever transmitted.
$29 for Your Entire Knowledge Workflow
QuickSay is a one-time $29 purchase that works across every Windows application, not just Obsidian. Use it for Obsidian notes, then switch to your browser for research, your email client for replies, and your code editor for documentation — the same hotkey, the same voice-to-text workflow, everywhere you type.
$29
One-time purchase. No subscription.
8x
Smaller than Wispr Flow (105 MB vs 800 MB)
8 hrs
Free daily transcription via Groq