Dictating into Obsidian with Parakeety
Short answer: with Parakeety running in the menu bar, click into any Obsidian note, hold the section key (§), talk, release. The transcript pastes at the cursor as plain text inside whatever Markdown file you have open. Obsidian’s editor is a standard Mac text surface and Parakeety pastes via the system clipboard, so dictation works in the editor, the daily note and the quick-switcher without any setup. There is a quiet symmetry to the pairing too: Obsidian keeps your notes as local files and Parakeety keeps the transcription on the device, which means the whole stack stays on the machine. If you want the background on how local dictation on the Mac actually works, that is the wider map; this page is about the day-to-day inside Obsidian specifically.
Why the local-first pairing fits
Obsidian’s defining choice is that every note is a plain Markdown file in a folder on your disk. There is no proprietary database and no cloud account standing between you and your words; if Obsidian disappeared tomorrow, your vault would still be a folder of text files you can open in any editor. That is the reason a lot of people who care about owning their notes end up there.
Dictation usually breaks that promise. The built-in voice typing in many apps, and most of the standalone cloud dictation tools, send your audio to a server to be transcribed. So the moment you start speaking your notes instead of typing them, the local-first vault gains a cloud dependency through the side door. Parakeety closes that door: audio is captured to memory, transcribed on the Apple Neural Engine and discarded, and the text pastes straight into the Markdown file. Nothing about your notes touches a network. The vault stays local and so does the path that fills it.
Where dictation fits inside Obsidian
Some surfaces inside Obsidian pay back more than others. A rough order of where speaking beats typing:
| Surface | What you dictate | Payback |
|---|---|---|
| Daily note | Quick capture, log entries, a running journal | Highest. Speed of capture is the whole point, and speaking is the fastest way to get a thought down |
| Long note | The first draft of an essay, a literature note, a project write-up | High. A spoken first pass beats a blank page; format and link afterwards |
| Meeting or call note | Your own recap straight after, while it is fresh | High for the recap. Parakeety does not transcribe the call itself, only what you say into it |
| Quick-switcher / new note | A note title, a search term | Modest. Short, but it works in that field like any other |
| Frontmatter and tags | Property values, plain-text tags | Low. Keys and symbols are faster typed; dictate the values if they are prose |
Quick capture into the daily note
The daily note is where dictation earns its place first. Obsidian ships a core Daily Notes plugin, and the community Calendar plugin adds a month view for jumping between days; either way you get one note per day that becomes the default landing spot for whatever turns up. The hard part of capture is never the writing, it is doing it before the thought evaporates. A loose sentence you have to stop and type is a sentence you often lose.
The loop is short. Open today’s note, put the cursor at the end, hold the section key, say the thing, release. Remember to ask Priya about the migration window before Thursday. The onboarding copy still reads like a legal disclaimer, rewrite it warmer. Idea for the talk: open on the airplane-mode test instead of the architecture diagram. Three captures, a few seconds each, and they are sitting in a plain Markdown file you can tag, link or move into a proper note later. The friction that loses fleeting ideas is exactly the friction dictation removes.
Drafting a long note by voice
The other strong fit is the first draft of something longer: a literature note working through an idea, an essay you are thinking out loud, a project brief. The blank note is the obstacle, and a spoken pass clears it faster than a typed one. You talk through the argument the way you would explain it to a colleague, in full sentences, and Parakeety adds the punctuation as it goes. What lands is rough in places but complete, which is a far better starting point than a cursor blinking at the top of an empty file.
The discipline is the same one that works in any drafting tool: get the prose down in one pass, shape it in the next. Do not stop mid-flow to fix a word the speech model rendered oddly; keep going and clean up at the end. The same separation of drafting from revision is the heart of dictating book-length work into Scrivener, and the writers-side framing of why a spoken first draft so often beats a typed one is in Parakeety for writers and researchers.
Dictate the prose, format afterwards
The one thing to get straight before you start: Parakeety transcribes spoken prose, it does not type Markdown syntax on command. It will not insert a hash for a heading because you said the word "heading", and it will not start a bullet list because you said "bullet point". What it does well is turn what you say into clean, punctuated sentences. So the working pattern is to dictate the prose and add the structure afterwards.
In practice that means speaking a paragraph, then reaching for Obsidian’s own formatting once the words are down: type the # for a heading, the - for a list item, the [[ to open a wikilink to another note. Trying to dictate the symbols themselves is slower and less reliable than just typing them, because spoken structure rarely maps cleanly onto Markdown characters. Treat dictation as the prose engine and the keyboard as the formatter, and the two stop fighting each other.
- Click into the note first. Obsidian has several text fields, the editor, the quick-switcher, the command palette. Make sure the cursor is in the note before you hold the key, or the words land in the wrong box.
- Dictate in paragraphs, format in passes. Speak the prose, then add headings, lists and links once the text is sitting in the note.
- Type the wikilinks and tags. The [[ autocomplete and #tag entry are faster by keyboard, and they trigger Obsidian’s own suggesters.
- Proper nouns drift. Names that are not standard English words sometimes come out wrong. A quick read-back, or a find-and-replace at the end, is faster than correcting them mid-flow.
- Hold-the-key discipline. Push-to-talk means Parakeety only listens while you hold the key, so an open vault is never quietly recording. The reasoning behind that choice is in push-to-talk versus always-on dictation.
What Parakeety does not do here
Two boundaries worth naming. Parakeety dictates live: you speak, the words paste at the cursor. It does not transcribe an existing audio file or recording, so a voice memo already sitting in your vault is not something Parakeety turns into a note. And it does not listen to a meeting and write up both sides; the recap is what you say into the note afterwards, not an ambient transcript of the room.
It also runs only on Apple Silicon Macs with macOS 14 or later, because the transcription happens on the Apple Neural Engine. Dictating notes on the phone and syncing them in is a different shape of workflow; the on-device install lives on the Mac. If you keep notes in more than one tool, the same hold-key-and-talk loop works in Notion and in Apple Notes too, so the muscle memory carries across.
FAQ
- Does Parakeety work inside Obsidian on Mac?
- Yes. Obsidian is a native Mac app and its editor is a standard text surface, so Parakeety pastes at the cursor the same way it does anywhere else. Click into a note, hold the push-to-talk key, talk, release; the transcript lands wherever the cursor is. It works in the editor, in the daily note, in the search-and-create box, and in any other text field Obsidian shows.
- Can I dictate Markdown formatting like headings and bullet points?
- Not as syntax. Parakeety transcribes spoken prose and adds punctuation; it does not type hash marks for headings or dashes for bullets on command. The workflow that holds up is to dictate the prose first and format afterwards: speak the paragraph, then add the heading, the list markers and the links by hand or with Obsidian’s own shortcuts. Spoken structure rarely maps cleanly to Markdown symbols, so separating the two passes is faster than fighting it.
- Does dictating into Obsidian keep everything local?
- Yes, the whole path stays on the Mac. Obsidian keeps your notes as plain Markdown files in a local folder on disk, and Parakeety transcribes on the Apple Neural Engine without sending audio anywhere. Audio is captured to memory, transcribed locally, pasted into the note and discarded. The only outbound traffic Parakeety produces is a one-time speech-model download on first launch and periodic license checks; neither carries your notes or your voice.
- Is dictation good for quick capture into a daily note?
- It is one of the strongest fits. Quick capture rewards getting the thought down before it goes, and speaking is faster than typing for a loose sentence or two. Open the daily note, put the cursor at the end, hold the key and say the thing. The note is captured in seconds and stays a plain Markdown file you can tidy, tag or link later. The friction that usually loses a fleeting idea is the friction dictation removes.
Try it
Parakeety is a Mac menu-bar app. Hold the section key, talk, release; your words paste at the cursor in whichever app you were typing into, including any note in your Obsidian vault. Audio never leaves the machine, so the local vault stays local. There is a free 7-day trial with no card required. After that it is $30 once.