Notes
Dictate into Obsidian without breaking the local-first deal
Your vault is plain markdown sitting on your own disk. Dictation should not be the one part of that stack that quietly ships your words to somebody else's server.
Free tier runs on-device. macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon or Intel.
Workflow
What to use voice for in Obsidian
- Daily notes, which only survive if filling one in takes under two minutes
- Literature notes where you say, in your own words, what the paper actually argued
- The long thinking note that later gets split into three atomic ones
- Project notes written up straight after a call, while the details are still exact
- Filling in the stub notes your wikilinks created months ago and you never wrote
Friction
Where typing slows Obsidian down
- Daily notes die when the template asks for more than you can be bothered to fill in
- Thinking out loud is how notes connect to each other, and a keyboard is a poor medium for thinking out loud
- Vaults fill with unresolved links because making the link is fast and writing the note is not
- Long-form reasoning gets compressed into bullet fragments that mean nothing in six months
Examples
Things you would actually say
Spoken out loud, at normal pace. The words below are the input, not the output — Hyprcore types them where your cursor already is.
“Daily note for the twenty fourth: shipped the sync fix, spent most of the afternoon on the Zettelkasten thread in the forum, and I want to revisit whether my folder structure is doing anything my tags are not already doing.”
“Literature note on the Sutton essay: the claim is that general methods which scale with compute beat handcrafted domain knowledge, and the part I keep coming back to is that he dates the pattern to Deep Blue in nineteen ninety seven.”
“This note is about the difference between an atomic note and a summary. An atomic note holds one claim I can link to. A summary holds someone else's structure. I keep mixing the two, which is exactly why my backlinks pane is so noisy.”
The whole path stays on the machine, which is rather the point
People choose Obsidian for a specific reason: the files are yours, they are markdown, they sit in a folder, and nothing has to phone home for you to read them in twenty years. Bolting a cloud dictation service onto that undercuts it quietly, because every note you speak becomes a request to an API somewhere, whatever the files on disk look like afterwards.
The free tier ships a speech model that runs locally on your Apple Silicon Mac. The recording is processed on the same machine the vault sits on, and nothing is sent anywhere. Pro can route difficult audio to Deepgram or Groq if you want that, which is a switch you flip rather than a default you inherit. Whichever path is active, custom vocabulary applies to it, and that matters in a vault full of surnames, codenames, and words you made up.
One honest limit: speak the sentences and type the markup. Saying "open bracket open bracket" aloud is slower and less reliable than reaching for the keyboard, and headings and callouts are no better. What works is talking a paragraph through, then adding the links and the structure with your hands afterwards.
Frequently asked questions
Where inside Obsidian can I dictate?
Anywhere text goes in: the editor pane, the note title, the quick switcher, and any plugin field that takes typing, because the words land at whichever cursor is currently blinking. There is no community plugin to install and nothing to configure inside the vault.
Can I dictate wikilinks, tags, and headings?
Not well, and we would not recommend trying. Markdown syntax is faster with a keyboard. What custom vocabulary does help with is getting the note titles and proper nouns spelled correctly, so the link you type afterwards resolves first time.
Does my speech get uploaded anywhere?
Not with the local model, which is included on the free tier and runs entirely on your Mac. Cloud transcription exists on Pro as an option for difficult audio, it is off unless you choose it, and you can switch back at any point.
Will it interfere with my Obsidian hotkeys or plugins?
Hyprcore has its own global shortcuts for dictation and for Action Mode, both of which you can rebind if one collides with something in your vault. Text arrives the way typed text arrives, so plugins that react to editor changes see nothing unusual.
Dictate somewhere else
Last reviewed July 25, 2026.
Try it
Talk into Obsidian.
Free tier transcribes on-device on your Mac — no credit card required.
Native macOS · On-device dictation · No credit card