Tasker for mobile quick capture?

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1

Hi all,

I see that “mobile quick capture” is on the roadmap, but I was wondering if someone had already tried getting there with a Tasker (or similar) automation?

Speech to text, ideally run it through an LLM for pre-processing (similar to the WebClipper prompt?, but that could also be done later on the desktop), add to Vault into a dedicated folder, done?

Ideally without even having to unlock the phone - I’d love to trigger that via, say, the “Assist” button or a long-press on my headset?

The building blocks are all there, so I assume it’d be possible to achieve via some sort of quick prototyping framework - before I look further, has maybe someone already done it?

Best,
Lars

2

Have you seen Fleeting notes?

It’s a plugin and app combo that works for quick capture.

1 Like
3

Thanks, I will check this out.

4

It seems that the web site is dead? The docs are broken, the download link too, and the last activity by the sole author on Github was early October’24 …

Is this working for you?

5

Yes, it’s working for me. I just checked to make sure.

Can you install the plugin through obsidian?
And is the app available in the appstore/playstore?

6

No, the app is not available in the app store, neither on Google nor FDroid.

I could install the plugin but there’s nothing to connect it to.

Looks like you’re lucky and probably have a legacy install.

Let’s hope the feature is moved up in the roadmap …

7

Yes, you can achieve this using Tasker. Set up a Tasker profile triggered by the “Assist” button or headset long-press. Use the “AutoInput” plugin for capturing voice input and “AutoShare” or “AutoTools” to process it and send it to your Vault. Integrating an LLM would require a custom API call, but the text can be pre-processed later on a desktop.

8

Oh nice, thanks.

I just went ahead and tried it - there’s an even much easier path though: just have Tasker write a file in the Vault folder of your choice!

(Using AutoInput struck me as a bit daunting, to be honest.)

The main challenge seems for this to be to trigger the Vault sync. That only happens when Obsidian is opened, it seems.

I may have to look at how Obsidian Web Clipper transfers the data (via the obsidian URL), that might be even better.

9

For what it is worth , maybe this is useful for someone else as well - this just creates a note in my main vault, and on the desktop I then use a custom prompt with Copilot to turn it into an actual note with formatting, tags and an attempt at fixing up speech recognition issues.

Task: Speech2Note

A1: Get Voice [
     Language Model: Free Form
     Maximum Results: 1
     Timeout (Seconds): 30 ]

A2: Parse/Format DateTime [
     Input Type: Now (Current Date And Time)
     Output Format: y-MM-d_HH.mm.ss
     Formatted Variable Names: timestamp
     Output Offset Type: None ]

A3: Write File [
     File: Documents/Obsidian/Vault/MobileNotes/%timestamp.md
     Text: ## Raw
     
     The following text was captured at %timestamp with a confidence of %gv_confidence()%:
     
     %gv_heard
      ]

It turns out to be surprisingly straightforward, even if Tasker is a bit overwhelming.

I’ve got this bound to the assistant button now, much more useful than Gemini.

There are some limitations, but they’re mostly on the Copilot side, surprisingly - I’ve not yet figured out how to make it rewrite the note in place and rename it, and possibly refile it somewhere, but some friction and manual review is probably smart to have.

10

There’s a couple ways you can bodge something together to get a usable interface for clipping … I won’t talk about the TTS portion since I haven’t done any of that before.

Method 1: Share to Tasker → Task Saves to Vault

  • Tasker: AutoShare to handle the Android “Share” dialog.
  • Android Share dialog launches a custom Tasker Input dialog and you then handle the file saving to the vault.

Method 2: Share to Tasker → Task Redirect to Vault Directly via URI Handler, this would launch the Create Note dialog with data input.

`Task: S::Obsidian-NewNote

<The Vault>
A1: [X] Variable Set [
     Name: %obsidian_vault_name
     To: "Notes.Main Vault"
     Structure Output (JSON, etc): On ]

<The Vault>
A2: Variable Set [
     Name: %obsidian_vault_name
     To: Lightweight.Temp
     Structure Output (JSON, etc): On ]

<The Title : Leave blank for default.>
A3: Variable Set [
     Name: %obsidian_note_title
     To: Untitled
     Structure Output (JSON, etc): On ]

<FrontMatter: type>
A4: Variable Set [
     Name: %obsidian_note_type
     To: link
     Structure Output (JSON, etc): On ]

<The Content : Leave blank for default.>
A5: Variable Set [
     Name: %obsidian_note_content
     To: ---%0Atype%3A%20%obsidian_note_type%0A---%0A%0A%0A%0A%23link%20%23url%20%23from-android
     Structure Output (JSON, etc): On ]

<New Note X-Callback URI>
A6: Variable Set [
     Name: %obsidian_call_uri
     To: obsidian://new?vault=%obsidian_vault_name&name=%obsidian_note_title&content=%obsidian_note_content
     Structure Output (JSON, etc): On ]

<DEBUG: New Note X-Callback URI>
A7: [X] Variable Set [
     Name: %Obsidian_call_uri
     To: obsidian://new?vault=%obsidian_vault_name&name=%obsidian_note_title&content=%obsidian_note_content
     Structure Output (JSON, etc): On ]

<Debug Output>
A8: [X] Flash [
     Text: %obsidian_call_uri
     Continue Task Immediately: On
     Dismiss On Click: On ]

<The Call on the app>
A9: Browse URL [
     URL: %obsidian_call_uri
     Package/App Name: Obsidian ]

A10: Stop [ ]

`

NOTE: This works for Android 15, but has been hit or miss on Android 16 Beta 1. I haven’t looked into why that is yet.

What I do is use a very lightweight “Vault” of Obsidian that launches near instantly (more below), then I have a FolderSync that runs nightly that moves (not copies) those “notes” over to my main vault. Doing it this obscure way allows me to get Obsidian open very quickly for the purpose of quick note taking / clipping … it launches in about 1 sec or less, compared with my main vault that launches in about 8 seconds.

I have most plugins disabled on this lightweight vault, default theme, and a lot of the internal core plugins disabled (e.g. graph, canvas, back links, etc.).

See some more here: Obsidian URI - Obsidian Help

You’ll notice there’s also params for appending, clipboard, silent (process, but don’t open the vault/app), appending, and an assortment of others. For a few of these, the docs don’t say, but I believe something like append would be &append=true (same for clipboard, silent).

The Tasker task above has some example content that creates this:

Screenshot_20250126-151309
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