Voice dictation for Obsidian on a Mac

Worth knowing about Obsidian

• Obsidian's own help page defines a vault as "a folder on your file system which contains your notes, attachments, and the configuration folder with Obsidian-specific settings" — which is the whole reason a Deixis note drops into one so easily: both sides are already just files in a folder.
• Obsidian's home page says it "stores your notes locally as plain text Markdown files", that you can reach them "even offline", and that "Obsidian uses open file formats, so you're never locked in." Free mode writes exactly that: one Markdown note with its images in a folder beside it.
• Obsidian does have a voice feature of its own: the Audio recorder core plugin, which its page says "lets you record and save audio in an Obsidian note", for the times "where you can't type fast enough". It "saves the recorded audio file to your vault and embeds it at the end of the active note", and the recording stays in the vault even after you remove it from the note.
• What that page does not describe is any transcription: it says nothing about speech-to-text, and no core plugin in Obsidian's own list is a dictation feature. So Obsidian records your voice as an attachment to listen back to; turning it into words in the note is not documented as something Obsidian itself does.
• The file formats page lists Markdown (`.md`), Bases (`.base`) and JSON Canvas (`.canvas`), plus images, audio, video and PDFs that "can be embedded directly into your notes" — so a dictated note and its screen grabs are both ordinary vault citizens.
• Obsidian's Markdown is the plain kind: headings from `#`, task lists from a hyphen and `[ ]`, and internal links as `[[Wikilinks]]` or ordinary Markdown links. Deixis types text at your caret, so which of those you are inside is your business, not its.
• Properties — the structured fields at the top of a note — are "stored in YAML format at the top of the file", holding text, lists, numbers, checkboxes, dates and tags. Dictation lands in one the same as in any other box.
• Canvas is described as a core plugin for visual note-taking with "infinite space to lay out notes and connect them to other notes, attachments, and web pages", saved as "`.canvas` files using the open JSON Canvas format".
• Obsidian's privacy policy is short and good. Of the desktop and mobile apps it says "All data is saved locally on your device and is never sent to our servers" and "We do not collect any telemetry data" — with Sync and Publish covered separately, as the paid services that do send data. Deixis makes the same promise about your audio, which never leaves the machine under any setting.
• The app is "Free without limits. No sign-up required." Sync is $4 per user per month billed annually, Publish $8 per site per month billed annually, and a commercial licence is $50 per user per year.
• Obsidian's download page offers desktop builds for Windows, Mac and Linux, and mobile apps on the App Store and Google Play. Deixis runs on Windows, Mac and Android, with its iPhone keyboard in beta on TestFlight, and has no Linux build.