How to Dictate in Obsidian on Mac with Hearsy

Obsidian is built around the idea that writing is thinking. But typing can't always keep up with the pace of thought, especially when you're capturing ideas, journaling, or working through a problem out loud. Hearsy adds voice dictation to Obsidian on Mac. Press a hotkey, speak, and your words appear as text in whatever note your cursor is in. No community plugins, no cloud services, no configuration.

Step-by-step setup

1. 1

   Open Obsidian on your Mac

   Launch Obsidian and open the note you want to add content to, or create a new note. Navigate to your daily note, a zettelkasten entry, or any file in your vault.

2. 2

   Place your cursor in the note

   Click where you want the dictated text to appear. Hearsy pastes at the cursor position, so it works in the middle of a paragraph, under a heading, or in a new blank note.

3. 3

   Press your Hearsy hotkey

   Trigger Hearsy with your configured keyboard shortcut (default: Fn twice or a custom hotkey). The recording indicator appears in your menu bar.

4. 4

   Speak your thoughts

   Talk naturally. Capture a fleeting idea, dictate a journal entry, explain a concept you're learning, or narrate your daily log. Don't worry about structure — you can reorganize the text in Obsidian afterward.

5. 5

   Press the hotkey again to finish

   Tap the hotkey once more. Hearsy transcribes your speech locally, optionally polishes it with AI enhancement, and pastes the text into your Obsidian note. The text is just plain markdown in your vault.

Why use Hearsy for Obsidian?

Obsidian users tend to value two things: privacy and speed of capture. Your vault is local, your notes are yours, and the whole point is to get ideas out of your head and into markdown as quickly as possible. Cloud-based dictation tools conflict with that philosophy by routing your audio through external servers.

Hearsy aligns with how Obsidian works. All transcription runs locally on your Mac, so your spoken notes stay as private as the rest of your vault. There's no account to create, no API key to manage, and no plugin to install inside Obsidian. Hearsy operates at the macOS level, pasting text into whatever app has focus.

The speed matters too. Hearsy's Parakeet engine transcribes in under 200 milliseconds. You finish speaking and the text is already in your note. For daily journals, fleeting notes, and idea capture, this removes enough friction that you actually write things down instead of letting them slip away.

When to use voice dictation in Obsidian

Tips for better results

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  Use dictation for daily notes. Open your daily note template, speak your morning plan or end-of-day recap, and move on. Thirty seconds of talking replaces five minutes of typing.

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  Capture fleeting notes by voice. When an idea strikes, open a new note in Obsidian, dictate the thought, and tag or link it later. The goal is capture speed, not polish.

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  Enable AI enhancement for long-form notes. It cleans up filler words and structures your spoken text into proper sentences, saving you from editing afterward.

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  Dictate while reading. If you're taking literature notes or annotating sources, keep Obsidian open and dictate your thoughts as you read — it's faster than switching between typing and reading.

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  For zettelkasten entries, dictate the core idea first, then add links and tags by typing. Voice is faster for prose; keyboard is better for wikilinks and metadata.

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  Switch to the Whisper engine when dictating notes in languages Parakeet doesn't cover. Whisper supports 99+ languages for multilingual vaults.