Keep a voice journal in Obsidian from your Android phone

Checked 1 November 2026 by the Murlivo team.

Writing a journal every night is hard; talking for two minutes is easy. A voice journal lets you speak on a walk, in the car park or before sleep, and still end up with text you can search, link and reread in Obsidian. Murlivo works with any phone that runs Android 11 or newer, and the words never need to leave the phone.¹

Set it up once

1. Install Murlivo from Google Play and open it. Tap Get started.
2. On Choose where your notes go, tap Choose folder and pick the folder of your Obsidian vault on the phone. You can also pick a folder inside the vault, such as a journal folder.
3. Download the voice model when Murlivo asks. Do it once, on Wi-Fi. After that, everything works offline, even in airplane mode.¹
4. Optional: add the Murlivo Record widget to your home screen, or long-press the app icon and use New recording to start in one tap.

You do not need Obsidian itself for this to work. The notes are plain Markdown files, so any app that reads text can open them. Obsidian simply shows them as part of your vault.

The daily habit

1. Open Murlivo and tap the record button.
2. Talk. A few prompts that help: what happened today, what you felt, one thing you are grateful for, one thing for tomorrow.
3. Tap Stop. Add a title if you want one.
4. The phone writes the text and adds it to today's note. Open Obsidian and it is there.

Record as often as you like. Every recording on the same day goes into the same day's note, one after the other, so a day reads like a journal page:

## 07:58 · Phone
Slept badly, but the walk to work helped. I want to call Sam this week.

## 22:41 · Phone
Good day overall. The meeting went better than I feared.

Each section starts with the time and where it was recorded. If you tapped Mark while you talked, the note lists those times too. The audio is kept in an attachments subfolder next to the note, so you can always hear your own voice again.¹

How fast the text appears

A two-minute entry is usually ready soon after you stop. Longer entries take longer, and speed depends on your phone, because the phone does all the work.

How long it takes depends on your phone. On one of our test phones, a recent flagship with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, the default Small voice model needed about 2 minutes 40 seconds of work for a recording of 7 minutes 44 seconds (measured on 11 October 2026). An older or cheaper phone takes longer. On the same phone, the Accurate (larger) model took about a third longer, so keep Small unless you need it.

Why on the phone matters for a journal

A journal is the most private thing many people write. With Murlivo, the audio and the text are made and kept on your phone, in a folder you control. There is no account and no server copy of your notes. Anonymous usage data, which never contains audio, transcripts or note text, is on by default; you can turn it off in Settings, under About Murlivo.¹² If your vault syncs to other devices, the notes travel with it like any other file in the vault.

Limits to know

• Murlivo writes into an Inbox folder with its own daily file name. It does not write into the daily note of another plugin or template; link or move the text yourself if you want that.
• If Android loses access to the folder, for example after you move the vault, Murlivo shows Folder access lost. Until you reconnect, notes wait in a safe local folder and move over by themselves later.
• Speech-to-text makes mistakes, mostly with names and rare words. Reread an entry before you rely on it.
• It does not write summaries, tags or links for you. You get your own words, as text.

Questions

To compare other ways of getting voice notes into Obsidian, read Voice notes to Obsidian on Android. For every current fact about Murlivo in one place, see Murlivo product facts.

Sources

1. Murlivo product facts: version, platforms, price, recording limit, notes format and languages, checked 22 October 2026.
2. Murlivo privacy policy: what stays on your devices and what is sent, checked 22 October 2026.