What Augent does differently
take_notes eliminates the entire workflow. You give it a URL. It gives you finished notes.
One tool call handles the full pipeline: download the audio, transcribe it locally, save a .txt file to your Desktop, and return the content for Claude to rewrite into clean, structured, formatted notes. No manual steps. No raw transcript dumps. No copy-pasting between apps.
The output isn’t a transcription. It’s a finished document. Sections, headers, nested bullets, key insights pulled out and highlighted. The kind of notes you’d write yourself if you had unlimited time and perfect attention.
Straight into Obsidian
Here’s the problem nobody else solved: macOS has no built-in way to set Obsidian as the default opener for.txt files. Every notes file opens in TextEdit, plain and unformatted. All the rich formatting take_notes produces (headers, callouts, blockquotes, tables) gets stripped to raw text.
Augent fixed this. A one-time Obsidian setup makes every .txt file on your Mac open directly in Obsidian. Double-click any notes file and it opens instantly in your vault with full formatting. External edits from Claude sync to Obsidian in real-time.
That’s why take_notes goes all-in on formatting — it knows the notes will actually render properly. URL in, formatted notes in Obsidian. That’s the full loop.
Obsidian Setup
One-time setup. Every .txt file on your Mac opens in Obsidian with real-time sync.
Five styles for different needs
Different content, different format.take_notes has five style presets:
| Style | When to use it |
|---|---|
| tldr | You need the core takeaways in 30 seconds. One screen, bold key terms, nothing else. |
| notes | The default. Clean sections, nested bullets, structured for reference. What you’d write in a notebook. |
| highlight | Key insights get callout blocks. Important quotes get blockquotes with timestamps. For content where specific moments matter. |
| eye-candy | The full visual treatment: callouts, tables, checklists, blockquotes, dividers. When the notes themselves need to be a pleasure to read. |
| quiz | Multiple-choice questions generated from the content with a full answer key. Turn any lecture, tutorial, or course into a self-test. |
“Give me a quick summary of this talk” → tldr
“Take detailed notes from this podcast” → notes
“Take notes and pull out the key insights with timestamps” → highlight
“Take eye-candy notes from this lecture” → eye-candy
“Make a quiz from this lecture” → quiz
Read it back
For any set of notes, Augent generates a spoken audio summary usingtext_to_speech and embeds the audio player directly in the notes file. Open the file in Obsidian and press play. Hear a natural-voice summary of what you just captured, without reading a word.
Why it matters
Transcription is a solved problem. The hard part is going from a URL you don’t have time to watch to a finished document you can act on in under a minute.take_notes does the whole thing in one call — download, transcribe, format, save to Obsidian. No cleanup.
Tool Reference
Parameters, response format, and technical details