Meetings & Transcripts

journal can bring your meeting transcripts into the same search index as your notes. Once they're there, you can search across everything — your captured thoughts and your meeting discussions — in one place.

Two ways to add meeting transcripts

Option 1: Quill (macOS and Windows)

Quill records your meetings and stores everything in a local SQLite database. journal reads that database and renders your meetings to Markdown:

journal quill-sync       # pull new meetings into transcripts/
journal index            # embed them (or let `journal index --watch` do it automatically)

Quill is only available on macOS and Windows. If you're on Linux, use the manual transcript path below.

Option 2: Any recording (via WhisperX)

For Zoom calls, recorded presentations, voice memos — anything you have as an audio or video file — journal can transcribe and ingest them using WhisperX:

# Step 1: transcribe with WhisperX (one-time Python setup required)
python scripts/transcribe.py meeting.mp4 --min-speakers 2 --max-speakers 8

# Step 2: ingest into journal
journal transcribe ./out/meeting.json --title "Q2 Planning" --date 2026-06-02

journal transcribe renders the transcript to Markdown, generates an AI summary at the top (using your configured synthesis provider), and indexes it immediately.

The summary is important: a two-hour meeting is hundreds of search chunks, so the AI notes at the top are what search hits first, instead of making you trawl the full transcript.

Option 3: Drop in a .qm file

If you have a Quill .qm export file, drop it into your transcripts/ folder. With quill.accept_qm_imports: true (the default), the watcher picks it up and renders it automatically. This works on Linux too.

Using your meeting transcripts

Once synced and indexed, your transcripts are searchable like any other note:

journal search "what did we decide about the pricing model" --source transcript
journal search "anything about deployment" --source all      # notes + transcripts

List recent meetings:

journal meetings

Get an AI digest of the last week of meetings:

journal synth meetings --write

View a specific meeting:

journal show transcripts/2026-06-02-q2-planning.md

Keeping transcripts fresh

Set up a schedule to run quill-sync regularly. If you're also running journal index --watch, the watcher embeds newly-synced transcripts automatically:

# In cron: sync Quill meetings every hour, then re-index
0 * * * * /usr/local/bin/journal quill-sync && /usr/local/bin/journal index

If the watcher is already running, you only need to schedule quill-sync.

WhisperX setup (one-time)

WhisperX requires Python 3.11 and ffmpeg. Set up a virtual environment:

brew install ffmpeg                              # macOS; or your package manager
python3.11 -m venv ~/.venvs/whisperx
source ~/.venvs/whisperx/bin/activate
pip install -r scripts/requirements.txt          # in your journal source directory

You'll also need a free Hugging Face token (for speaker diarization), and you'll need to accept the terms for two gated models:

https://huggingface.co/pyannote/segmentation-3.0
https://huggingface.co/pyannote/speaker-diarization-3.1

Export the token in your shell profile: export HF_TOKEN=hf_...

Transcription is the slow step — a two-hour meeting can take a while on CPU. On a GPU-equipped machine it's much faster.