Transcripts in Your Vault: noctua for Obsidian Goes Both Ways

Listening is a great way to get through your reading. It’s less good for keeping what you’ve heard. You’re halfway round the park, an edition makes a point you want to hold on to, and by the time you’re home it’s gone. The audio is still in your feed, but you can’t search it, link to it, or quote from it.

The noctua plugin for Obsidian sends notes from your vault to your podcast feed. From today it also goes the other way: it can save the transcript of any edition back into your vault as a note. The transcript is the exact text that was read aloud, so what you heard on your walk ends up alongside the rest of your notes, ready to link and search.

This is in version 0.3.0 of the plugin. Update from Settings → Community plugins if you already have it, or install it here:

Open the noctua plugin in Obsidian →

Two ways to save a transcript

Automatically, as each edition is ready. Go to Settings → Noctua and turn on Save transcripts. From then on, whenever you send a note and noctua finishes preparing the audio, the transcript is saved to your vault straight away and the notice tells you where it landed.

On demand, from the command palette. Two commands cover the rest:

• Save transcript of this note’s episode — for a note you’ve already sent. It uses the noctua_id the plugin wrote into the note’s frontmatter. Run it on a transcript note and it refreshes that note instead.
• Save an episode transcript from your podcast feed — opens a searchable list of your editions and saves the one you pick. This works for everything in your feed, including editions made from web articles or emailed newsletters, which never had a note in your vault to begin with.

What the note looks like

Transcripts are saved in the folder set under Transcript folder, which defaults to Noctua transcripts and is created if it isn’t there. Point it wherever you keep source material.

Each note is the edition’s title as a heading, the transcript below it, and a few properties you can use in queries and links:

---
noctua_transcript_of: conv-8f21c0
noctua_url: https://api.cast.noctua.uno/p/pricing-research-notes-8f21c0
source: "[[Pricing research notes]]"
created: 2026-09-20
---

source links back to the note you sent, or holds the original article URL for an edition that came from the web or your inbox. If you have the plugin marking sent notes, the sent note also gets a noctua_transcript link to its transcript, so the pair are connected in both directions and show up in the graph.

Saving the same edition twice doesn’t make a duplicate. The plugin finds the existing transcript note by its noctua_transcript_of property, wherever you’ve since moved or renamed it, and refreshes the text while leaving your own properties alone.

A couple of other things worth knowing. Transcripts don’t cost credits, only sends do. And a transcript exists as soon as noctua has extracted the content, which is usually before the audio is finished, so you can save it early. If you ask too soon the plugin says so rather than failing quietly, and it stays available after the edition’s audio has expired.

An example: feeding an LLM Wiki

A transcript on its own is useful. It gets more useful when something connects it to everything else you know.

Earlier this year Andrej Karpathy published a short note describing an LLM Wiki. The idea is to stop re-reading the same sources and instead have an LLM keep up a Markdown wiki for you. There are three layers:

1. Raw sources. Articles, papers and notes that you collect. They never change, and the LLM reads them but never edits them.
2. The wiki. Pages the LLM writes and maintains: summaries, pages for people and concepts, and the links between them.
3. The schema. A file such as CLAUDE.md that tells the LLM how the wiki is organised and how to maintain it.

You mostly ask it to do three things. Ingest a new source, which means summarising it, updating the relevant pages, and noting it in index.md and log.md. Query the wiki and file good answers back as new pages. Lint it, checking for contradictions, stale claims and pages nothing links to. In Karpathy’s words: “Obsidian is the IDE; the LLM is the programmer; the wiki is the codebase.”

noctua transcripts make good raw sources. Everything in your feed is something you already chose to spend time on: newsletters, long reads, research summaries, your own drafts. Set the Transcript folder to wherever your raw sources live — raw/noctua, say — turn on Save transcripts, and the loop runs itself:

1. Listen to an edition on your commute.
2. Save the transcript, which has already happened if you left the setting on.
3. Ingest it: “Ingest the new transcripts in raw/noctua. Skip the spoken intro and sign-off, update the topic and people pages they touch, and log them.”
4. Query later: “What have I listened to this month that disagrees with our pricing assumptions?”

The created property gives your assistant the date to file things under, and source gives it the citation to link back to, whether that’s a note in your vault or the original article.

One caveat if you follow the pattern strictly: raw sources are meant to be immutable, and re-saving an edition rewrites the body of its transcript note. Let the LLM write its own notes about a transcript on wiki pages rather than editing the transcript itself, and you can always check a claim against what you actually heard.

The two directions work together. Once your wiki has a page worth taking in properly, send it back to your feed with the same plugin and listen to it on your next walk. What you learn from listening goes into the wiki, and the wiki gives you new things to listen to.

Listen on the go, then bring the transcript back to your desk.

Update the noctua plugin in Obsidian →

— The noctua team