AI meeting notes that write themselves into your Obsidian vault

Granola, Otter, Fireflies, Notion. They all store your meeting notes inside their own product. You can usually export, which means you can usually do a chore. The notes you want to link to your project page, your 1:1 note and your reading list end up somewhere your vault cannot see.

Convene inverts that. The file is the product. It appears in your vault the moment you stop recording, already formatted, already tagged, already linked.

One Markdown file per meeting, with frontmatter Dataview can query and a body you would not be embarrassed to have written yourself.

---
title: "Standup"
type: meeting
status: raw
source: convene
date: 2026-06-09T10:31:28Z
duration_minutes: 14
tags:
  - meeting
  - convene
attendees:
  - "Sarah Chen"
  - "Marcus Webb"
summary_provider: "anthropic"
summary_model: "claude-opus-5"
summary_prompt_version: "meeting-summary-v3"
---
 
# Standup
 
## Key Moments
 
- [[#00:38|00:38]] — Ship decision
 
## TL;DR
 
The auth migration shipped overnight behind a feature flag, with the
previous code path kept warm for a week. Rollback risk was judged low
enough to proceed ahead of Thursday's enterprise demo.
 
## Decisions
 
- Ship the auth migration now rather than hold it for after the demo ([[#00:31|00:31]])
 
## Action Items
 
- [ ] Sarah: Draft the release note — cover the flag and the rollback path (by Friday)
 
## Transcript
 
### 00:00
 
**You:** Before we start — I've got Convene running, so nobody has to take notes.
 
**Sarah:** Great. Quick update: the auth migration landed last night.
 
**Marcus:** Any rollback risk? We've got the enterprise demo on Thursday.
 
**Sarah:** Low. It's feature-flagged, and we kept the old path warm for a week.
 
> ⭐ **Key moment** (00:38) — Ship decision
 
**You:** Then let's ship it. Sarah, can you draft the release note?
 

The summary is only allowed to cite timestamps that exist in the transcript, and each one is written as a wikilink to the heading Convene emitted for that moment. So “decided at 00:38” is one click away from the sentence where it was decided.

The same is true of key moments: press ⌥⇧K during a call and the flag lands twice: in an index at the top of the note, and inline in the transcript at the right second.

• Install Convene and open Settings. Under General, choose your save folder. Pick the vault itself, or a subfolder like Work/Meetings if you would rather keep them together.
• Add an AssemblyAI key. Transcription runs on your own key, billed to you directly. Create one here.
• Optionally add an Anthropic or OpenAI key for summaries. Without one you still get the transcript, the key moments and the note, just no TL;DR.
• Record a meeting. The file appears in the vault when you stop. The summary arrives a moment later and rewrites the note in place.

Because the frontmatter is real structured data (attendees, date, duration_minutes, tags), Dataview and Bases can treat your meetings as a table. Every call with a given person this quarter, every meeting over an hour, every note still carrying unchecked action items: all of it is a query rather than a search.

There is no Convene account, no CloudKit and no sync service. Both apps write into the folder you chose, so if that folder is a vault synced by iCloud, Obsidian Sync, Syncthing or git, your meeting notes travel the same way the rest of your vault already does.

Convene writes through the system file coordinator specifically because synced vaults are the normal case. That is what keeps a note from landing half-written and turning into a conflicted copy.

How do I save meeting notes into my Obsidian vault?

Convene asks you to pick a folder the first time you run it. Choose your vault, or a folder inside it such as Work/Meetings. From then on every meeting is saved there as a Markdown file the moment you stop recording, and Obsidian picks it up on its next scan, usually instantly.

What does the note look like?

A single .md file named like “2026-06-09 103128 - Standup - a1b2c3d4.md”. It opens with YAML frontmatter (title, date, duration, attendees, and which model wrote the summary), then a Key Moments index, a TL;DR, decisions, an action-item checklist, and the full transcript under timestamped headings.

Does it work with Dataview and Obsidian Bases?

Yes. The frontmatter includes a tags list with meeting and convene, plus attendees, date and duration_minutes as real fields. Dataview and Bases can query all of it, so a table of every meeting Sarah attended this month is a few lines away.

Do the timestamp citations actually link to anything?

They are real wikilinks. When the summary says a decision was made at 00:38, that timestamp is written as a link to the ### 00:38 heading in the transcript below it, so one click takes you to what was actually said. Convene computes the transcript headings before it writes the summary, so a citation can never point at a heading that does not exist.

Will it break my iCloud-synced vault?

It handles it properly. Vaults synced through iCloud Drive are the common case, so Convene writes through the system file coordinator rather than dropping bytes on the path. That is what stops you ending up with “conflicted copy” files or a half-synced note.

Can the Mac and iPhone apps write into the same vault?

Point both at the same vault. There is no Convene account and no sync service. The Mac app and the iPhone app each write Markdown into the folder you gave them, and whatever already syncs your vault carries the files between devices.

Does it put anything else in my vault?

Only the note. The structured transcript JSON is kept in Application Support, deliberately outside your vault, so Convene never litters your graph with files you did not ask for. Audio is never written to disk at all.