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Qiaomu Clipper saves web pages and videos to Obsidian with local transcription and AI chat
Qiaomu Clipper is an MIT-licensed Chrome extension that saves articles and video transcripts to Obsidian, lets the user ask an AI about the content, and transcribes video on the local machine with Whisper.
Image: joeseesun/qiaomu-clipper
Why it mattersA knowledge worker who collects articles and videos faster than they can read them now has one tool that saves, transcribes and summarises the backlog into their own notes.
A reader who keeps saving articles and videos they never get back to has a new tool for turning that backlog into readable notes.
Qiaomu Clipper, released as version 1.13.0 on 5 October 2026, is an MIT-licensed Chrome extension that clips a web page or a video into Obsidian, chats with an AI about what the user is reading, and transcribes audio on the local machine. The repository was created on 2 October and had 144 stars by 6 October. It is built on top of the open-source Obsidian Web Clipper and uses Defuddle to extract article text.
What it does
In a browser tab, three quick presses of the a key opens a clean reader for the current article or video. The user can highlight passages, ask an AI about a selection, write their own notes, and save the whole thing to their Obsidian vault, with the Markdown version placed in the configured folder. A separate hotkey, qqq, triggers a one-click clip using the default template.
For video, the extension sits on YouTube, Bilibili and the Chinese podcast site Xiaoyuzhou by default, and offers an opt-in subtitle bar on TikTok, Instagram, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Reddit and others. The transcript appears alongside the player, and clicking a time stamp jumps the video to that point.
Transcription runs on the user's own machine
For videos that have no subtitles, the maintainer says the installer sets up a local Whisper engine on first use: an MLX build on Apple Silicon or faster-whisper on other machines, between 1.3 and 1.7 GB. The README reports that a 41-minute Chinese class on an Apple M5 Pro took one minute to transcribe end to end. Audio stays on the machine, and the maintainer says it is deleted when the task finishes.
Cloud transcription services, including SiliconFlow's Qwen3-ASR, Doubao, Zhipu GLM, Stepfun and MiMo, can be configured as alternatives, in which case the audio is uploaded to the chosen provider and billed by that provider.
AI chat uses the user's own key
The chat panel reads the current article or video transcript as context. The user supplies their own key for an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, Anthropic, Google Gemini or Ollama. The maintainer says the extension does not supply any model account or free credits, and that conversation history is kept in the local browser, up to 40 articles and 15 messages each.
What a user has to install
The extension targets Chrome and ships as source for now, so a user installs Node.js 22, clones the repository, runs npm ci and npm run build:chrome, then loads the dist folder as an unpacked extension. Writing to the Obsidian daily note needs a separate local helper, which is a Python 3.9 script in the repository. The maintainer says Firefox and Safari builds use upstream code and the Windows helper has passed automated tests but has not been verified on a real machine.
Source
- Primary source: joeseesun/qiaomu-clipper on GitHub
- Release notes: 1.13.0
This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.
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