Tomo: Talk to Your Obsidian

Your notes, now with a voice.

Tomo is a native SwiftUI companion app that bridges your personal Obsidian vault with real-time online intelligence, location telemetry, and Siri orchestration.

⚡ Two Ways to Interact

Tomo provides a dual-interface designed for both on-the-go quick actions and deep, focused thinking:

🎙️ Siri AI (Voice & On-the-Go): Hands-free control via iOS App Intents. Perfect for quick lookups, dictating notes while walking, or invoking location-based commands in your AirPods.
💬 In-App Chat Console (Deep Work & Writing): A dedicated, private chat panel next to a clean markdown editor. Perfect for deep research, writing articles, summarizing monthly journals, and typing detailed queries.

🍏 The Apple Intelligence Difference

Older integrations relied on rigid voice templates (e.g., Apple Shortcuts that could only run pre-defined scripts). Tomo leverages the next-generation Apple AI and App Intents frameworks to enable true context-aware intelligence:

Capability	Legacy Siri (Shortcuts)	Next-Gen Siri AI (Tomo + Apple AI)
Search Method	Rigid, exact keyword matches.	Semantic Search: Understands concepts (e.g., matching “Kyoto sights” to travel notes containing temples).
App Orchestration	Can only open apps or run static, hardcoded shortcuts.	Dynamic Chaining: Siri reasons across apps (e.g., reading a note, extracting tasks, and registering them in Reminders).
Context Awareness	None.	On-Screen & Location Context: Siri understands what you are reading in Safari or matches recommendations to your active GPS location.
Privacy & RAG	Required sending note text to cloud endpoints.	Local Neural Engine: Semantic search and summaries are processed 100% on-device via Apple’s CoreSpotlight AI — no data leaves your phone.

📱 Siri + Second Brain in Action (Voice Scenarios)

Here is how Tomo combines the voice of Siri with the knowledge of your Second Brain:

🤝 1. Hands-Free Meeting Briefings (Personal CRM)

Scenario: You’re walking to a coffee shop to meet a contact.
Voice Command: “Siri, what did I discuss with Sarah last time and what projects is she working on?”
Behind the Scenes: Siri calls Tomo to search your meeting logs and project folders, summarizes the key takeaways, and reads them directly into your AirPods.

🗺️ 2. Personal Taste Matcher (Travel + Online Search)

Scenario: You’re exploring Kyoto and want a lunch recommendation.
Voice Command: “Siri, suggest a good lunch spot nearby.”
Behind the Scenes: Siri fetches highly-rated restaurants online, filters them against the food preferences, allergies, and wishlists stored in your vault (e.g. loves ramen, avoids spicy food), and suggests the perfect spot.

📝 3. Seamless Life Logging (Project & Asset Trackers)

Scenario: You just refueled your car or finished a study session.
Voice Command: “Siri, log a refuel of 800 THB to my Toyota Altis tracker.”
Behind the Scenes: Siri finds the matching asset note in your vault, formats the date and value into a clean markdown table row, and appends it directly to the note.

📋 4. Auto-Sync Checklist (Notes to Reminders)

Scenario: You want to sync your project checklists with your system reminders.
Voice Command: “Siri, find my house renovation note and add all incomplete tasks to my Reminders.”
Behind the Scenes: Siri reads the note’s markdown checkboxes and automatically creates individual task items in your iOS Reminders app.

💬 In-App Chat in Action (Deep Work & Writing)

For complex tasks that require writing, reviewing, and high cognitive load, the dedicated in-app chat console works directly alongside the local markdown editor:

📈 1. Weekly Reflection & Journal Analysis

Scenario: You’re doing a weekly review on Sunday evening.
Chat Prompt: “Analyze my daily logs from the past week. What were my top accomplishments, and what blocker patterns kept recurring?”
Behind the Scenes: Tomo retrieves the last 7 daily journal files directly from your vault, parses the text locally on-device, and drafts a structured summary highlighting your progress and time sinks.

✍️ 2. Knowledge Synthesis & Article Drafting

Scenario: You want to write a blog post using your compiled research.
Chat Prompt: “Synthesize my notes on ‘Y Combinator AI Startups’ and draft a 500-word article about product-market fit.”
Behind the Scenes: Tomo searches your vault semantically, retrieves the most relevant notes, uses a cloud model (like Claude) for advanced reasoning, and streams the draft article directly into the side-by-side markdown editor for you to polish.

🇯🇵 3. The Ultimate Language Tutor (Voice Speaking + Text Feedback)

Scenario: You want to practice conversational Japanese using vocabulary you’ve actually studied.
Voice Practice: Ask Siri: “Practice Japanese with me.” Using your vault’s study notes (like Learning/Japanese/), Siri conducts a state-of-the-art back-and-forth spoken conversation, correcting your pronunciation in real-time.
In-App Feedback: Later, open the Tomo app to find a written transcript of your spoken lesson. The chat console displays detailed grammar corrections, definitions, and spelling drills right next to your study sheets.

🔒 Privacy & API Cost Control

Free by Default: On-device AI (Apple Neural Engine) and Apple’s Private Cloud Compute run at zero cost — no API keys needed for most tasks once the app is on the App Store.
Your Own Keys (Optional): For very large context tasks (200K+ tokens), bring your own API key for Claude (via Anthropic or OpenRouter), Gemini, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Groq, or a self-hosted Ollama server. Keys are stored securely in the iOS Keychain with zero subscription markup.
iCloud Native: Accesses your vault safely using iOS document sandboxing and security-scoped bookmarks.
Private Index: Your search index lives entirely on-device inside iOS CoreSpotlight and is never uploaded to any servers.

🖥️ macOS Desktop & Deep Linking

Tomo is designed as a companion app, not an editor replacement.

macOS Desktop Version: A lightweight companion app (operating in the menu bar or running as a background daemon) will handle native CoreSpotlight indexing for your local vaults on macOS.
Deep-Link Redirection: When you select a search result in Spotlight (indexed by Tomo) or click a note within Tomo, the app opens it directly in Obsidian. This is achieved by registering Spotlight searchable items and linking in-app actions to the native Obsidian URI scheme:
- Open Note: obsidian://open?vault=VaultName&file=Path/To/Note.md
- Search: obsidian://search?vault=VaultName&query=SearchQuery This workflow ensures you use Spotlight and Siri for rapid search and automation, but transition back to Obsidian’s rich editing environment for focused writing.

🚀 How It Works (Under the Hood)

Select Your Vault: Point the app to your Obsidian folder in iCloud Drive or local disk.
On-Device Indexing: The app scans your vault and registers every note into iOS/macOS CoreSpotlight — Apple’s on-device search engine. No external database, no custom embeddings.
Real-Time Sync: It monitors your vault in the background, updating the search index incrementally whenever you write a note in Obsidian.
Hybrid Routing Engine: Intelligently routes queries — local notes are searched on-device via Apple Intelligence, short tasks run on the Neural Engine, and complex reasoning escalates to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute or your own cloud API keys.

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App Idea: Tomo — Talk to Your Obsidian