FR: External Integration: Connect Your Content Across Platforms (blog, email, social media, etc.)

[brianpetro]

What if Smart Connections was connected to external platforms?

Imagine seeing the relevant content you've created outside of Obsidian from within your vault through Smart Connections.

Below is a screenshot showing this feature in action. I integrated my blog, so posts are included in my Smart Connections.

This would save a lot of time for someone like myself by helping me remember what I wrote in emails and published on my blog or elsewhere.

But I need your help!

I need help focusing on integrating Smart Connections with the platforms that will matter most.

Don't miss out on this opportunity to have your voice heard and make Smart Connections even smarter.

Respond here with the names of the platforms you want to see integrated into Smart Connections!

[arminta7]

Make.com, Notion, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, Dropbox, Discord, Google Docs. Somewhat in that order of importance.

[vguillet]

Being able to include tabular data would be great! Might be worth looking into GPT_index for simplifying integration with external sources and add support for more file types!

[brianpetro]

I'll be accepting beta testers for a Gmail integration shortly.

Please join the waitlist at EmailGPT.com if you're interested in being a beta tester!

[fedorbass]

Amazing!
Yes, email integration would be fantastic.
Also history and bookmarks for chromium browsers. In my case - Arc.
For me personally, it would be a great value to have a bridge between personal obsidian and other tools, mainly used for business:

• Notion notes
• craft app notes
• slack messages
• discord messages
• Git commits
• Telegram messages

[brianpetro]

@fedorbass thanks for the input :)

Bookmarks are on my shortlist. Still have to figure out the syncing process, though.

When you say git commits, do you mean the text, code, or both?

Discord is another shortlisted item.

All useful suggestions, thank you!

[pinuke]

If you end up being short on beta testers, let me know.

I don't want to ask to be a beta tester, since I don't have the best availability for unit testing while I'm in school, but I'm excited to help

[brianpetro]

@smartguy1196 that would be great. Did you join this wait-list? https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScj0ShJKDh9gmH6c7cAKjDqM5h48Slhn2MSOY0Wgk-GQc1Rvw/viewform

Basically, I'm just waiting for a sufficient amount of people on the wait-list before I make the effort to convert the tools from for-personal-use to being ready to handle other people using them.

Filling out that form will help me decide when is the right time. Thanks for your interest and continued support!

[Mattabase]

Zapier connections and Microsoft power apps connectors

[vguillet]

Overleaf for keeping track of the state of reports along with leveraging their content in real time!

[vguillet]

And of course Zotero for enabling advanced scientific use cases! (for a literature review this would be nothing short of game changing)

[brianpetro]

Hey @vguillet

Thanks for the suggestions. I haven't seen overleaf before, thanks for sharing!

Do you use any of the current Zotero plugins? I'm wondering if there might be a way that Smart Connections might integrate with one of those.

Thanks
Brian 🌴

[vguillet]

Highly recommend it for any collaborative report writing workflows! Regarding zotero, I have tried a few, and finally settled on using this one for now, but I would personally be more interested in the plugin directly connecting to one's zotero account online and retrieving the papers from there. This would allow zotero to become smart connection's scientific brain, which could be easily extended through adding papers on the fields we would want our assistant to gain expertise in!

[emilypastewka]

Instapaper! I have an automation such that highlights & loved articles get into Obsidian, but I have a HUGE list of things I haven't read in there. This could really help prioritize what to read next.

[jasondavis]

Eagle.cool is almost equally as amazing to me as Obsidian, MS Visual Studio Code, and ShareX.

Eagle App is a Media Manager or Collection Manager to organize photos, video, website bookmarks, PDFs, and almost any other file type.

The browser extension then allows to quickly capture screenshots to the app or bulk save photos in a webpage to the app

The features are extensive but one of the cool things is it also has a build in REST API.

So my goal is to have my Obsidian and Eagle work together since they both have the capability

[shepner]

I would like to see in roughly order of preference:

• Slack
• Google BigQuery
• GitLab
• gmail (possibly including Calendar)
• Jira (preferably older self hosted versions)
• Google Drive
• Google Sheets
• LucidChart
• Miro
• Confluence (preferably older self hosted versions)

Id also really like all the above to run in an OpenShift namespace and interface all of my Obsidian notes as published via a mkdocs website but I suspect Im on my own for that part :P

[dvansoye]

Medium.com - I publish articles there.

[engr-lynx]

YouTube (transcripts) - This is very useful when making connections between your own notes and embedded YouTube videos.

Also blog integration for reasons similar to YouTube integration.

[dannygithub1]

Personally - Microsoft Outlook / Gmail would be incredible.

Plus not sure if possible, but LinkedIn / Facebook integration would also be pretty amazing. So you can ask questions based on both private knowledge (from your vault) and public knowledge which you would not need to take notes on.

[OLH21]

• General web content ( web link, blog article ...) linked in obsidian vault md doc and yes bookmarks as an extension
• youtube transcript
• Onedrive and google drive doc of course

and
mail with attachment : google/microsoft

[rsnakeactual]

Definitely need Office365 and Google Calendar (at the same time because like many others I work on multiple things at the same time). Problem is without my calendars ChatGPT cannot know what I should work on and in what order of priority.

[RobTour]

Another vote for Zotero. I currently use Zotero Integration plugin, which imports notes and annotations from Zotero. It also allows citations and bibliographies.
Recently I have added the Annotator plugin, which allows the user to open and annotate PDFs in Obsidian and imports the annotations directly into a note.

[EDIT] Wow - It looks like you can ask questions of PDSs opened in the Annotator plugin!! I just tried it and it seems to work well.

[MichelleGDyason]

Zotero!! would be great. i read, take notes in Zotero, and export my notes and annotations to Obsidian with Zotero Integration, Zotero Bridge, and Zotero Link. Most of the content citations in Zotero are linked to the PDFs in a storage file in Zotero. i can only find the file through the Zotero interface, which can be annoying at times, for example, if i want to read it in another interface.
i write essays, reports, and literature reviews and conduct research. So if Smart Connections could analyse the PDFs in my vault that i've not yet read (and have read) and from that suggest related or otherwise recommended PDFs (of my vault or external books/PDFs) readings would be great. it would also be great if these unread PDFs reading recommendations came with a substantial summary to help me decide if and when i should read the recommended PDFs.

and thanks for this app and this thread for our wish list. i'm anticipating if i can get the embeddings to work, it will be a great plug-in :)

[SirNoName2705]

Hey I am a little bit late but anyways ^^.
I think the most relevant advancement since GPT4 is code interpreter.
If one could enable a specific area in the vault to be used as a coding playground, that would be awesome.

I know that this is easier said than done, but if gpt could execute code that would be, besides a security issue, an enormous gain for productivity. One could try to enable api endpoints for GPT enable gpt to restructure the vault, creating multiple nodes, use regex, rename nodes, try to write plugins etc.
Also you could open up a repo, where other people could show their scripts so that you would not have to develop everything on your own but users could make plugins for your plugin ^^

[bmorphism]

@SirNoName2705 whether most significant or not (I would actually say it is the Geometric Transformer or something like thermodynamic linear algebra, or Faith and Fate paper... time will tell) -- for the interpreter experience (code executing from natural language and encapsulated in an Agent) e2b offers greater interoperable open-source sandboxed functionality and best of all, focuses on easy to integrate Playground abstraction: https://e2b.dev/docs/playgrounds/overview

[brianpetro]

@SirNoName2705 I like the way you're thinking.

And thanks for the sandbox resource @bmorphism

🌴

[kctdfh]

TXT directory would be amazing! I have a collection of e-books in PDF, MOBI, and EPUB - but it's easy to convert them to TXT, which I imagine would be much easier to chunk. I haven't played with it yet but I think Unstructured is a good candidate for getting clean chunks out of a messy piece of text like a converted book, with a table of content, misplaced page numbers, index, etc.

[SirNoName2705]

TXT directory would be amazing! I have a collection of e-books in PDF, MOBI, and EPUB - but it's easy to convert them to TXT, which I imagine would be much easier to chunk. I haven't played with it yet but I think Unstructured is a good candidate for getting clean chunks out of a messy piece of text like a converted book, with a table of content, misplaced page numbers, index, etc.
@kctdfh if you want that and would be willing to pay for it, I have the solution for you.
I Offers highly advanced OCR. I wanted to write a plugin for obsidian using their API, so that one can enter the API key and get good OCR.
You can get 20 pdf pages a month for free if you sign with your university e-mail, or 10 a month if you do not have one.
It costs you about 5€ a month and you get 500. Thereafter, you can pay on a per-page basis.

Obviously, it is not perfect and it cannot recognize my handwriting. But that is hard for me to ^^.
I also think it does not work by OCR only, as it has better quality if you upload your pdf as if you only upload an image.
I have converted all Linear Algebra materials to Markdown with that tool. That is about 600 Pages and it works almost perfect. I think some errors are maybe because it misinterpreted something here and there, perhaps because the material is in German, but I do not know.

[kctdfh]

@SirNoName2705

OCR is not a big issue for me because mostly it's just books and reports. I've used OCRmyPDF with a lot of success. And then I use Calibre to convert the PDF to something else. Again, it's not perfect and may or may not break if the formatting is complex but for this use case, I'm sure it'll be fine. Either way, I'd be interested in checking out the tool you mentioned!

[FeralFlora]

Hey @vguillet

Thanks for the suggestions. I haven't seen overleaf before, thanks for sharing!

Do you use any of the current Zotero plugins? I'm wondering if there might be a way that Smart Connections might integrate with one of those.

Thanks Brian 🌴

I would suggest looking into the API provided by Zotlit for access to the Zotero database. The API docs have not been updated as the plugin received significant updates recently. But there should be a zoteroAPI since version 1.0.0:

forward API to global window property zoteroAPI for other plugins to use

See also: PKM-er/obsidian-zotlit#82

Alternatively, I believe Zotero Integration is looking to add similar access to it's Zotero database. But that is not available yet. Zotero Integration accesses Zotero through an API provided by the widely used Better Bibtex addon for Zotero. You could do the same.

See: https://github.com/mgmeyers/obsidian-zotero-integration/tree/56223d007762ca3b626ed6046a178f2a98bbe5f1/src/bbt

[lzilioli]

Jira–seeing all jira tickets that might relate to a given note would be amazing

[BennyCorbi]

https://raindrop.io/

[lzilioli]

Really I think what would be ideal is a plugin API exposed by smart connections so that other obsidian plugins can easily integrate with the smart connections vector db. if i could just throw a json object at the smart connections plugin api with a standard format like

{
  textContent,
  title,
  date,
  linkToSource,
}

and smart connections does the rest with respect to integrating the textContent with the embeddings/vectordb/smart connections and resurfacing it when relevant, that would be super awesome, and provide an amazing amount of flexibility. With this approach, others could create obsidian plugins that integrate with any service and bridge it to smart connections through a relatively simple API, and free you up to focus on the internals and making smart connections and embeddings more accessible to the masses.

[martindkaz]

Connecting to other Obsidian vaults would be very useful in my opinion. Thanks!

[andrexibiza]

Another vote for Zotero. I currently use Zotero Integration plugin, which imports notes and annotations from Zotero. It also allows citations and bibliographies. Recently I have added the Annotator plugin, which allows the user to open and annotate PDFs in Obsidian and imports the annotations directly into a note.

[EDIT] Wow - It looks like you can ask questions of PDSs opened in the Annotator plugin!! I just tried it and it seems to work well.

I've been dying to figure out how to use OCR'd .pdf files w Smart Connections! I'll have to try this Annotator trick...

[antonvh]

Certainly my blogs. And Email would be great too, but not so important.

[sc0ttwad3]

May not be the right place... but a means for changing/setting connections to different LLMs than just OpenAI. In particular Gemini, Claude, and others (may be too much to ask, but a local LLM that adheres to OpenID API standard, would be super terrific.)

[brianpetro]

@sc0ttwad3 was working on this today ☺️

Should be available as early release for supporters to beta test by the end of the month.

🌴

[BlackUdon]

Local llm

[destiny911]

https://raindrop.io/

I've been trying to find a way to incorporate raindrop into obsidian. (I tried to reply to someone else suggesting this sorry I dont know how :)

[MilooHub]

Files and Docs stored in DEVONthink on macOS system.

Note: DEVONthink is a major files and archives managing software for information works and researchers on macOS. This brilliant archive and information manager has been around for many years. Many Obsidian users use DEVONthink to store and manage various files and contents downloaded from the internet, then use Obsidian to manage personal highlights and annotations made against these downloaded files and docs stored in DEVONthink.

In a sense, Obsidian + DEVONthink would make a great suite as Second Brain PKM system for users on macOS.

So it would be wonderful if Smart Connections could implement AI integration in Obsidian to information and files stored in DEVONthink.

[brianpetro]

Recorded response https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX33miMbgB8