A month ago, I showed off Samurai Scribe to y'all. I got some great feedback and was pleasantly surprised to hear that the biggest draw was the Obsidian-like bones (agreed, Obsidian is love 💜). Thanks to you, I believe it's settled into the final form: "A Markdown-Vault-First AI Meeting Notetaker"… kind of like a code repository but for your meetings.

Recap from last time: Samurai Scribe is…

• an AI meeting notetaker I've been building for over a year
• runs on your computer by default, on Mac + Windows
• has no meeting bots, no account, no subscription
• free forever, or $19 once for Pro

Major features since last month:

(This baby is getting big 🍼)

• Sep 28
  • Wispr-Flow-style dictation. Hold fn (Mac) or Ctrl+Win (Windows)
• Oct 5
  • Beautiful and informative animations (total game changer, trust me bro 😎)
  • Transcribe via URL from YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and hundreds more sites
• Oct 15
  • An AI assistant, informally named Wakizashi (the famous short sword wielded by samurai alongside their katana 🪭). I'm basing it off of AI coding agents, so it literally has the power to edit anything in your vault (with your approval, just like Claude Code)
  • Claude Code, Codex or Cursor can read your meetings through the built-in MCP server or just by opening your vault folder
  • Skills: Markdown files, just like the ones in your codebase. And Connections: simple tools to connect to 3rd party apps like Linear, Jira, Notion, Todoist, etc. All in an open-source repo
  • Attach PowerPoints, PDFs, Word docs and images, and they x`x`feed into your summaries
  • A much better Markdown editor, with Obsidian-style live preview
• Oct 21 (today, build about to drop!)
  • Live speaker ID: it labels who's talking while you record
  • Queue up a batch of meetings to process one after another

Why markdown is so great.. & blah blah

# EXAMPLE SAMURAI SCRIBE VAULT Vault/ ├── AGENTS.md # <------ Tells AI apps how your vault works ├── Meetings/ │ ├── 2026-10-20 Design Review/ │ │ ├── 2026-10-20 Design Review.md # <------ Meeting note │ │ ├── Transcript.md │ │ ├── Summary.md │ │ ├── Notes.md │ │ ├── Q4 Roadmap.pdf # <------ Attached slides feed the summary │ │ ├── _meeting.json # <------ Meeting metadata │ │ └── _playback.m4a # <------ Recording │ ├── 2026-10-17 Customer Interview - Acme/ │ └── 2026-10-15 Sprint 15 Planning/ ├── People/ # <------ A note for everyone you name │ ├── Marta.md │ ├── Priya.md │ └── Sam.md ├── Notebooks/ │ └── Customer Research/ # <------ A notebook of related meetings │ ├── Customer Research.md # <------ Lists its meetings; ask across them │ └── Interview Themes.md # <------ Your own notes live here too └── Skills/ └── brief/SKILL.md # <------ Run it with / 

• Your AI tools can edit it natively Open the folder in Claude Code or whatever AI coding tool you like best
• Open it anywhere. Obsidian, VS Code, Finder. It's just folders and .md files
• Vault is customizable: You can structure it any way you want, add files & folders. You like NotebookLM? Add a note which links to a bunch of meetings and have AI index them for answers
• Future-proof. If Samurai Scribe dies tomorrow, your notes don't

Roadmap 👣

• Action items that work with Obsidian's Tasks plugin, and index into a database for quick searching and editing across meetings
• Video note-taking: I think this is a natural progression for the app, but I need to do more research into it. Lmk what would you want from it?
• Linux: if enough people want it (comment if you do)
• Your suggestions shape this: I read everything. Post here on reddit, or in the Samurai Scribe discord (link in comments)

Great alternatives

There are a ton of great meeting transcription apps out there. These are a few of my top recommendations if Samurai Scribe isnt your thing

• TranscribeX: if you are on Mac and you like bulk YouTube transcription then this is the goat! Shoutout to this app for showing me that local diarization can be done well
• Talat: really great local note taker for live meetings. I just learned about it several weeks ago and it has really great live transcription and clean UI
• Meetily: the OG open source note taker. Proved out that local technology like this is possible in the first place

Finally, and what I want from you

Since my last post: 6 releases and 367 commits, on 26 of the last 28 days, all after my day job. All because I set out to build my mom a simple meeting recorder. She got a Markdown vault, an MCP server and a sword-themed AI assistant instead. Sorry mom 🙇

Solo dev, so I won’t pretend I don’t need the help: try it, send it to a friend who lives in meetings, or tell me what sucks. All of it genuinely helps 🙏 I'll give away 25 free lifetime Pro codes to the first 25 commenters who drop constructive feedback (what it gets right, what it misses, what would make you switch), or simply *"I'd use this to record ___"***, and I'll DM you a code 🙂