Transforming Audio Notes: From Dream to Reality with Python

Behind the Build

Since publishing my first post about building the first few phases of a dream pipeline that would take me from scattered voice memos to organized, searchable writing gold—automatically, intelligently, and painlessly.

What I Dreamed Up: The OG Pipeline

Back then, my INTP brain was overflowing with “what if?” questions:

• What if every voice note could be auto-transcribed, tagged, and logged?

• What if I could summarize every idea with GPT, then file it by chapter, theme, or scene?

• What if Notion, Bash, Whisper, and Python could all just talk to each other—and do my organizing for me?

I mapped out an ambitious, multi-stage pipeline:

• Stage 1: Auto-transcribe, clean filenames, audit everything, summarize with GPT
  Stage 2: Sync with Notion, merge in handwritten/typewritten notes, tag and organize
  Stage 3: Index and search in Notion, tie it all together with Zapier and APIs

I imagined a world where I could just record, and the system would do the rest; and as any builder knows, the path from idea to execution is always a little messy.

From Voice to Value: Building My Whisper + Notion AI Pipeline

When Voice Became a Workflow

On any given day, my INTP brain brims and overflows with *cool ideas* to streamline apps, tools, workflows, and User Experience across virtually every product or tool I touch.

I can't help it. It's an innate curiosity to understand how things work, what makes systems go, and how to make them go better.

For some, it's philosophical questions that keep them up at night (What is the meaning of life? Where do thoughts go?). For me, it's the idea that won’t let go—the one that whispers, "This could make that boring/repetitive process so much better."

Often these ideas stem naturally from the many side projects I dive into.

Photo by Polina Zimmerman

One of those ideas sparked while writing my book—a passion project I’ve been developing over the last year using the notebook system popularized by Mary Adkins and The Book Incubator. Like many great authors—Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, JK Rowling, Stephen King—I draft by hand.

But being an INTP means my thoughts fire off in a thousand directions, often showing up while walking my dog or driving.

I voice-record myself dictating story beats, scenes, or thoughts when inspiration strikes. That, combined with 40,000 words scattered across apps and platforms created a monster.

To make things work for me, I often voice record myself dictating parts of my book using Google Recorder when the spirit strikes, or in Notion, or even in the form of messages I send myself via Slack. What an editing nightmare!