Posts tagged with "Automation Academy"

How Federico Turns Voice Recordings into Searchable Obsidian Notes with Shortcuts, Hazel, and LLMs →

Automation on the Mac is powerful because you have so many choices when building a workflow. Now, with large language models, you can do even more, which is the approach Federico took in his latest Automation Academy lesson for Club MacStories Plus and Premier members:

I built a hybrid automation to bridge spoken words and Markdown – a system that combines the non-deterministic nature of human language and messy voice recordings with the reliability of Shortcuts, the power of Hazel rules on macOS, and the flexibility of LLMs, which are ideal for processing natural language. The system revolves around a shortcut called Process Transcript that takes the raw transcript of a voice recording and turns it into a structured note in Obsidian, complete with a summary, action items, an embedded audio player, and an internal link to the full transcript.

It’s an amazing automation that takes his audio notes, transcribes them into text, structures the results in an Obsidian template that includes extracted tasks, and embeds the original audio file and transcript for reference. Along the way, Federico used Simon Willison’s llm CLI, Google Gemini 2.5 Pro Hazel, Shortcuts, and other tools. It’s a great example of how to make the most of automation on the Mac.

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Federico’s Latest Automation Academy Lesson: Working with Web APIs in Shortcuts →

Linked By John Voorhees

Federico’s Todoist shortcuts.

Earlier today, Federico released a collection of four advanced Todoist shortcuts as part of his Automation Academy column, an exclusive perk of Club MacStories+ and Club Premier.

Federico started using Todoist again a few months ago specifically because it has a robust web API:

There were several reasons behind my decision to return to Todoist, but the most important one was its web API. I’m convinced that our modern AI era is marking a resurgence of web services, and I wanted to find something that could theoretically support some kind of connection to an AI assistant (such as ChatGPT or Gemini) down the road. At the same time, I also wanted something that could be easily _and_consistently automated. With more responsibilities coming into my life, it’s essential for me to automate all the boring parts of my job that can happen without my manual, time-consuming input. With the combination of a REST API and native Shortcuts actions, Todoist simply felt like the perfect candidate.

Federico is absolutely right. As I recently wrote for Club members, web apps have been on the rise for a long time, and the trend is only accelerating with the ascension of AI tools. As a result, knowing how to use web APIs with Shortcuts is only going to become more important over time. Sure, you can often manage to scrape information from a website directly, but you’re much better off with a thoughtfully designed REST API that can fetch data for you in a structured way.

Today’s Automation Academy installment is the perfect place to get started. Todoist’s API is rich and thorough, and Federico takes readers through each of his four shortcuts in a methodical but conversational way that concludes with key takeaways readers can use in other contexts.

I struggled with implementing web APIs in Shortcuts for a long time. Web APIs aren’t easy. But today’s Academy lesson is the perfect introduction that starts with the basics and builds up to more advanced techniques, helping readers do more with Todoist and apply their new skills to other web APIs they encounter.

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