OMI Obsidian Setup (2026 AI Second Brain Guide)

The OMI Obsidian setup is the closest thing to a real-life Jarvis you can build right now, and after running this stack daily for months I'm convinced it's the best second brain a solo founder can put together in 2026. The combination captures everything you say and do, files it intelligently, and lets an AI agent recall any of it on demand — all for the price of a single hardware purchase and zero monthly fees.

This post walks through the exact stack I use every day, from the OMI capture device through to the Obsidian vault and the Hermes agent that makes the whole thing intelligent. I'll cover what each layer does, how they wire together, and the workflows I run on top to turn passive capture into actual cognitive leverage.

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What OMI Actually Is

OMI is a tiny wearable device that listens to your day and turns everything you say into searchable, structured text. Conversations, ideas, meetings, and stray thoughts all get captured passively without you needing to remember to hit record. Once captured, the audio is transcribed and exported into whatever system you've wired up to receive it.

The magic isn't OMI on its own — plenty of devices can transcribe audio. The real value is where the data goes next, which is exactly what the rest of this stack solves.

Why Obsidian Is The Destination

I've tried Notion, Roam, Logseq, and a half-dozen other note tools for this kind of capture, and Obsidian consistently wins for three reasons that compound over time.

The first is local file ownership. Obsidian stores every note as a plain markdown file on your machine, which means you own the data forever and there's no vendor lock-in to worry about when the next shiny tool launches. The second is the plugin ecosystem — there are hundreds of community plugins, including ones that let you wire AI agents directly into the vault, so the system grows with whatever new capabilities you want to add. The third is the linkable knowledge graph. Backlinks turn captured thoughts into a real network of ideas, and the compound effect over months is enormous because every new note can connect back to everything that came before it.

The Stack At A Glance

The full setup is three layers that each do one job well. OMI is the capture layer that listens passively and turns audio into transcripts. Obsidian is the storage layer that keeps every transcript as a markdown file in your vault. Hermes is the recall layer — an AI agent that reads the vault and answers questions in plain English.

Each layer is replaceable if you find a better option later, but this combination is what's working best for me in 2026 and it's what I'd recommend to any founder starting from scratch.

Step 1 — Set Up OMI

Order the OMI device from their site, pair it to your phone, and create an OMI cloud account so transcripts auto-sync. The hardware is friendly enough that you'll have it running within ten minutes of unboxing. If you don't want hardware, OMI also offers a software-only mode that captures audio through your phone microphone instead, and that works fine for most use cases.

Step 2 — Set Up Obsidian Vault

Download Obsidian from their website — it's free for personal use — and create a new vault. I name mine second-brain because that's what it actually becomes after a few weeks of consistent capture.

The folder structure I use follows a slightly modified PARA system that's served me well across hundreds of notes. The 00-inbox folder is where raw OMI captures land before I process them. The 10-daily folder holds my daily notes. The 20-projects folder is for active work I'm shipping. The 30-areas folder covers ongoing life areas like health, finance, and relationships. The 40-resources folder is for reference material I want to keep but not act on. Finally, the 50-archive folder is where done or dormant work goes to live out its days.

Keep it simple. You can refactor as you grow, but starting with a clean PARA structure means you won't waste a weekend rearranging folders later.

Step 3 — Wire OMI To Obsidian

OMI's cloud has a markdown export, so getting transcripts into Obsidian is a question of how automated you want it to be.

The manual path is the simplest — once a day or once a week, you download your OMI exports and drop them into the 00-inbox folder. There's no automation to build and nothing to break. The automated path uses a small script (typically a cron job) that pulls OMI exports into the vault on a schedule, which I cover in detail in Hermes Second Brain.

For most founders, manual export weekly is more than enough. Don't over-engineer this on day one — get the capture flowing first, then optimise the plumbing once you actually feel the friction.

Step 4 — Add Hermes For Recall

OMI captures and Obsidian stores, but neither of those gives you recall. You need an agent that can read the vault and answer questions in plain English, which is where Hermes comes in.

Install Hermes through the one-click Ollama installer, then point it at the Obsidian vault folder so it knows where to read from. Once configured, you can ask Hermes things like "what did I decide about pricing last Tuesday?" or "summarise my conversations with Sarah this month" or "pull every note tagged #client-x and draft a status update." Hermes searches the vault, reads the relevant notes, and produces a coherent answer in seconds.

That's the second brain in action. Without this layer, you've just got a pile of notes — with it, you've got a queryable memory.

Step 5 — Install Key Obsidian Plugins

Three plugins genuinely earn their place in the second-brain stack and I install them on every new vault.

Dataview lets you query notes like a database, which means you can build dashboards that aggregate captures across folders and tags. Templater auto-formats incoming OMI notes so you don't waste time cleaning up frontmatter and headings every morning. Smart Connections adds AI semantic search inside Obsidian, which is brilliant for surfacing related notes you'd forgotten existed.

You don't need anything else to start. Install these three, give them a week, and only add more once you hit a specific limitation.

Watch The Walkthrough

This Hermes walkthrough covers the agent side of the stack, which is what makes the vault genuinely useful rather than just a passive store of notes.

Daily Workflows On Top Of OMI Obsidian

Once the stack is wired up, the same five workflows have ended up doing most of the heavy lifting in my day.

The morning prep workflow has Hermes read yesterday's OMI transcripts and generate a brief covering decisions made, todos created, and follow-ups owed. Five minutes of clarity before the day starts beats an hour of "what was I supposed to do today?" by a wide margin.

The meeting recall workflow runs after every call. The OMI transcript is already in the vault, so I just ask Hermes for action items and a summary, which means I never need to take notes during meetings and can actually pay attention to the human in front of me.

The idea capture workflow runs on Fridays. Random ideas flow through OMI all week, and at the end of the week I ask Hermes for the best ones. Most weeks I find one or two that are worth exploring further, which is genuinely how a few of my biggest projects have started.

The client brief workflow has Hermes pull every conversation about a specific client and generate a status update. What used to take 30 minutes of scrolling through emails and Slack now takes 30 seconds of agent time.

The content drafts workflow turns voice notes into blog post outlines. I'll talk through an idea while walking, OMI captures it, and Hermes turns it into a structured draft I can edit into a real post.

Privacy Considerations

Privacy matters here, so it's worth being precise about what stays local and what touches the cloud.

What's local is the Obsidian vault itself, which lives entirely on your machine, and Hermes through Ollama, which runs the LLM locally so your queries never leave your hardware. What's cloud is the OMI transcription itself, which by default goes through OMI's cloud infrastructure to handle the speech-to-text step.

For most founders, OMI cloud is fine — the transcripts are encrypted in transit and stored under your account. For sensitive industries like legal or healthcare, you can run local STT instead, which keeps everything on-device at the cost of slightly worse transcription accuracy.

Cost Breakdown

The economics are why this stack wins long-term. The OMI device is £79 as a one-off purchase, or free if you go software-only. Obsidian itself is free, with optional Sync at £8/month if you want their managed sync. Hermes plus Ollama is free. Total cost is £79 one-off and £0 per month thereafter.

Compare that to the alternatives. Notion AI runs £8/user/month, Granola is £14/month, and Otter is £17/month. Over two years, the OMI Obsidian stack saves you anywhere from £200 to £400 per user while giving you better privacy and full data ownership.

Common OMI Obsidian Mistakes

Three mistakes I see people make repeatedly, all of them avoidable.

The first is over-organising on day one. Don't build twenty folders before you've captured anything — start with the PARA structure I described above and refactor as the actual usage tells you what's needed. The second is skipping Hermes. A vault without an AI layer is just a pile of notes that you'll never re-read; the agent is what turns it into a genuine second brain. The third is ignoring the inbox. Process your 00-inbox weekly by tagging, linking, and archiving, otherwise the vault becomes a graveyard of unprocessed captures.

What OMI Obsidian Won't Do

Honest about the limits. The system won't replace deliberate writing, because OMI captures spoken thought but writing is what forces clarity. You still need to sit down and write the hard things. It also won't solve the "what to focus on" problem — the vault is a tool, but strategy is still your job. And it won't magically fix scattered work; if your inputs are scattered and unstructured, the vault will reflect that. Garbage in, garbage out.

What OMI Obsidian Replaces

In my own stack, OMI Obsidian has retired Evernote, Apple Notes, Roam, Notion AI, Granola, and Otter. Six tools collapsed into one stack that's cheaper, more private, and more capable than any of them individually.

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The Compound Effect

The reason this stack matters isn't what it does in week one — it's what it does over twelve months. In month one you'll have a few useful captures and the system will feel like overkill. By month three the second brain starts answering questions you'd forgotten you asked, and you start to feel the leverage. By month six it becomes a genuine cognitive prosthetic that you reach for instinctively. By month twelve you can't imagine working without it.

The compounding is the whole point. Start small, stay consistent, and let the vault grow over time.

When OMI Obsidian Fits

This stack is best for knowledge workers, solo founders, consultants, and anyone whose primary work is thinking. If most of your day is meetings, decisions, and ideas, the leverage compounds fast. It's not a great fit for manual labour roles, sales-floor work where typing notes is fine, or people who simply hate journaling and won't process the inbox.

OMI Obsidian Vs Other Stacks

Stack	Capture	Storage	AI Recall	Cost
OMI + Obsidian + Hermes	Wearable	Local MD	Local LLM	Free + £79
Notion AI only	Manual typing	Cloud	Built-in	£8/mo
Granola	Mac app	Cloud	Built-in	£14/mo
Otter	Mobile/web	Cloud	Built-in	£17/mo

For privacy and ownership, OMI Obsidian wins on every dimension that matters long-term.

FAQ — OMI Obsidian Setup

Do I need the OMI hardware?

No — OMI software-only works just fine through your phone microphone. The hardware is just hands-free convenience and is worth it for me, but it's not required.

Can I use a different vault than Obsidian?

Yes — Logseq, Foam, or even a plain folder of markdown files all work with Hermes. Obsidian is the easiest because of its plugin ecosystem and quality of life features.

What if I don't have Hermes?

You can use the Smart Connections plugin or query the vault manually with Claude or ChatGPT. Hermes is best for daily automation, but it's not strictly required to get started.

How much storage do I need?

A full year of OMI transcripts comes in at roughly 500MB to 1GB of plain text. Tiny by modern storage standards.

Can my team share the vault?

Yes — you can use Obsidian Sync at £8/month for managed sync, or roll your own with Git-based sync if you're technically inclined.

What's the steepest part of the setup?

Wiring Hermes to read the vault is the trickiest piece, and it takes about 30 minutes the first time. Everything else is one-click installs.

Is the £79 OMI device worth it?

For me it paid back by week two. If you don't want to spend on hardware, software-only is genuinely free and still works.