How to turn meeting recordings into Notion or Obsidian notes
A meeting recording you never re-open has no value. The goal is to land each meeting in your knowledge base — Notion or Obsidian — as a structured, searchable note you’ll actually use.
What a good meeting note contains
- A one-paragraph summary and a list of action items
- The full diarized transcript (who said what)
- Metadata: date, participants, duration, topics — for filtering and linking
- Links to related notes (previous meetings, projects)
The pipeline
- Transcribe + diarize the recording (locally if it’s sensitive).
- Summarise into a summary + action items (a local LLM via Ollama keeps it private).
- Format as Markdown with YAML frontmatter — Obsidian reads frontmatter natively, and Notion imports Markdown.
- Route the file: into the right Obsidian vault folder, or push to a Notion database with fields (date, attendees, topics).
Notion vs Obsidian
- Obsidian: local-first Markdown files +
[[wikilinks]]. Ideal if privacy matters — the whole vault stays on your machine. - Notion: hosted database with structured properties and sharing. Better for team visibility; data lives in Notion’s cloud.
Doing it automatically
Cloud assistants like Fireflies can push notes to Notion, but they process audio in the cloud. For private workflows, an on-prem tool transcribes locally and emits Markdown you drop into Obsidian — see on-prem vs cloud transcription and the best on-prem transcription ranking.