Automatically transcribe your Evernote voice notes

I am a big believer in taking notes and working on my personal infrastructure. I find joy in polishing the “Artur OS” and removing little pockets of friction in my setup. Have a look at my automation philosophy:

Why do you have so many bots?

Recently, we adopted a dog and I have quite a bit of time spent walking. What if I could use it for some deep thinking?

So I wrote a bot.

How does it work?

A: I record an audio note on my phone:

B: I run my magical code

C: A transcription shows underneath

D: Profit!

There are other ways to solve this problem. Particularly, Otter.AI is a great service to transcribe your notes. However, it requires extra manual steps to open the app, export recordings, etc.

If you don’t have an elaborate setup behind your Evernote account, I recommend you check out Otter.

What do you need:

1. You need to set up the PHP (Yes) SDK for Evernote
2. You need an API key to Google Cloud Speech API. You don’t need a client library! Just follow these steps:
   1. Enable the API for your project here
   2. Create a new “API Interface Key” here

This code assumes you already search for a note and pass it in. I tag a note with `Tools`. A cron job periodically checks the label and does certain magical things on the notes tagged with it.

Code

It finds the audio recording in your Evernote note and transcribes it:

More of my adventures in automation:

I covered my automation philosophy in https://t.co/ieo9sGmMLz

The main goal is to reduce cognitive load and let me do more stuff with less time.
This is a thread 🧵with ongoing improvements to my personal infrastructure 👇.

— Artur Piszek (@artpi) January 10, 2020