What I’m trying to do
I’m trying to achieve a god-like setup for vault management and research with the help of AI plugins. Perhaps some of you AI geeks could point me in the right direction?
My main use case for obsidian is notes from everyday life, as well as research in different topics like health, energy, climate, politics and so on. I usually listen to a lot of podcasts, and write key insights in a notes app. And then do research on it in Perplexity or Grok. I’m not super dependent on either, but I do really like them for their own usecases.
My ideal workflow in a future setup would be something like this:
- Learn something new from a youtube video (podcast) or article read.
- Get transcript, summary and key insights from video/article, and add it to vault.
- Pick research topic from insight, and make Perplexity or Grok reports of a subject (preferably from within Obsidian).
- Use online AI to read each subject, give insights, further research suggestions, links between topics (pages), analysis/summary of a set of topics and so on.
- Use AI (local or online) to help organize and manage my vault. Moving pages, tagging, changing headers etc.
Things I have tried
Transcription/matadata:
- Obsidian webclipper - Works ok to get metadata from many webpages. Especially youtube. The template auto selection seems very unreliable though. Does not auto transcribe.
- Glasp - Seems to work ok. Except for it using auto-translate from google, if possible. It results in some bad translation. Especially in more technical language. Summaries cost extra, but such could be used with other AI tools.
AI management / research tools
- ObsidianAITools (community plugin) - Paid, but decent value with all the AI providers and engines, but too limited as it can’t interact with the vault.
- Infio Copilot (community plugin) - Free. Can connect to almost any AI. Seems to do much of what I want, but it fails to do the right thing sometimes. Not writing to page, not writing the correct thing etc. Not sure about it’s management capabilities.
- Copilot - Have not installed it yet, as it seems to need an expensive subscription and only tied to ChatGPT? No access to grok (need it for non-woke answers sometimes).
Considering
- Claude Code. For local vault mangement. Seems very good.
- MCP server for advanced options and interoperability between AI tools.