Drafts vs. Whisper Memos: What Am I Missing?

Software
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In case anyone is interested, prompted by this topic, I went on a little voyage of discovery to see if I could incorporate AI transcription along with some existing tools. Further, by not spending any more money along the way, too.

So this is what I came up with…

  • Just Press Record to dictate on my Apple Watch
  • That file gets created on iCloud direct without having to interact with the iPhone app
  • OpenAI Whisper - small model, installed on Mac with Homebrew (free)
  • Hazel rule to watch the Just Press Record iCloud folder and its subfolders for newly created files
  • Shell script acts on any new files added using Whisper to transcribe from audio
  • Outputs a text file to Drafts’ Inbox folder on iCloud
  • Drafts auto-imports the file’s contents and applies the “JPR” tag

Yes, I know Just Press Record does transcription on iOS, but you have to get it out of the app itself. With the workflow above, I can now dictate at length on my Watch – without worrying about cut off times – and the AI transcription then appears in Drafts when I’m back at my Mac.

Edit - Took another look at this, and as drafts in Drafts can be created from outside of the app using AppleScript, I cut out the last 2 steps by having the Hazel script take the Whisper output and create a draft in Drafts direct. This means no waiting for Drafts to auto-import from the Inbox folder. If you have the MCP/CLI bits installed, you could just use the CLI I would think.

2nd edit - I was looking for a similarly quick way to do this on the Mac as on the Apple Watch. Just Press Record is available on the Mac, but I wanted something a bit quicker to invoke. I tried my copy of Piezo, but that involved having to name the file prior to creation. So, as is usually the case, in steps Sindre Sorhus with the free Recordia which does exactly what I was after. It sits in the menu bar with recordings started/stopped by a keyboard shortcut. Files are created and auto-named with time stamp. Hazel then does its bit to transcribe and create a new draft in Drafts just as per the other workflow.

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