How to Hands-free dictate draft and add to Obsidian (2026)

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1

I’m trying to create a completely hands-free way to capture a dictated note to Drafts and then run an action that adds the text to an Obsidian document. I’ve searched and found a few potential answers that I can’t get to work, and many were from before the (I assume relevant) “Create Draft with dictation” shortcut action.

So, I can A) create the new draft with that shortcut. And I can B) run an action on a note using the “Run action on draft” shortcut action.

What I can’t figure out is how to select the note I just created in Drafts to perform Step B? The “Run Action on draft” action either asks me to select a note…or wants a Shortcut input that Action A doesn’t appear to provide?

Note: I find Shortcuts totally counterintuitive, much more so than my dabbling in Javascript, Python, and Keyboard Maestro, so I may be overlooking something simple. In which case, my apologies!

2

Probably your best move would be to use the Drafts “Dictate Text” shortcut action. It uses the the Drafts dictation interface, but just returns the result text to the shortcut, so then you can follow that with a “Run Action on Text” without ever creating a draft…or you could still use “Create Draft” to create a draft if you wanted a version of it still around in Drafts.

To be hands free, you’d need to have your dictation timeout set so it would automatically end the dictation on silence.