New plugin: Captain's Log (Voice Memos)

Share & showcase
1

Hello, happy to share my new plugin. This plugin functions as a voice memo tool for outputting structured and consistent memos/notes/journal entries. It uses Google’s Gemini API (which is completely free, for now at least). The transcription and summarization is very fast! A 6 minute voice note is transcribed within 10 seconds using gemini-2.0-flash-lite (other models may be slightly slower). You can feed in any note template you want, along with a custom prompt. You can choose to save the audio file or not.

The main idea is to have an automated system for quick morning/night brain dumps and journaling. You can even launch the recorder with an Apple Shortcut! (see repo for details).

Here’s the repo: GitHub - jack-stanley/captains-log. If you want to try it out, it’s best to use the BRAT plugin for loading and updating.

Note that this plugin is heavily inspired by (and much of the code is lifted from) the “Smart Memos” plugin made by Evan Moscoso. The main difference is that his plugin is OpenAI only (mine is Gemini only for now), and his does not have templating functionality. It also hasn’t been updated in 7 months, so it may be abandoned.

Please let me know if there are any bugs or additional features you’d like to see!

Here are my TODOs:

  • Allow custom note/audio file names and patterns.
  • Provide context to the model of previous notes.
  • Allow for offline audio recording and later transcription.
  • Integration with Obsidian’s Daily Note.
  • Allow for multiple note templates.

And instructions:

  1. Install the plugin from the Obsidian community plugins store (NOTE: not yet approved, in the mean time load this plugin with BRAT).
  2. Enable the plugin in your Obsidian settings.
  3. Get a Google AI Studio API key from here: https://aistudio.google.com/apikey. You may need to create a new Google Cloud project. Don’t worry, usage of these models within reasonable limits (such as this plugin) is totally free (for now). You should not be billed for usage of this plugin.
  4. Paste the API key into the plugin settings.
  5. Click the “Record Memo” button in the Obsidian ribbon to start recording your log. Recording will start immediately.
  6. You may pause the recording and resume at any time. The stop button (square) will only save the audio file.
  7. Click the “Transcribe” button once you are finished with your recording to get a summary of the audio file.
2 Likes