# Creating an AI Chatbot in Obsidian > We talk about creating an AI chatbot in Obsidian using Smart Connections. It's basically a really easy way to "talk to your notes" with whatever AI model you like. **Published:** 2024-07-08 | **Updated:** 2026-08-11 | **Categories:** Talks Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWC7AEjyZD0 --- ## Transcript Hey, how's it going? So today I want to talk about this idea that we've been pursuing for quite a while, and this is the idea that all of this knowledge we can put into some sort of database or tool or, you know, documentation system and we can then pull from that database as a collective as our agency to basically keep hold of all the information, knowledge, and grow as we grow as a team. Um, now there isn't particularly anything out there at the moment that does this in a simplistic way until we basically found this tool which is called Smart Connections. Now there are a couple of extra bits that I wanted from this, which is offline functionality, the ability to use your own API keys with whatever AI tool you get, because as all of these AI tools kind of accelerate, they're getting better every single day. So you want to always be on the front runner. So if ChatGPT or OpenAI gets a brand new tool, you want to make sure that that's the best one and you're using the best price for your money. And then if it ends up being Anthropic, you know, swap over. So Smart Connections is really cool because first of all, you can see all the different types of AI functionality you can use. You can use any of these. You can even spin up a local AI for the actual tool, but for the sake of today I'm going to be using Claude 3.5 Sonnet. And now on the left hand side, you can see all this information that we've actually set up to try and help people get on board to Obsidian because it's not the easiest tool to get onboarded with. In fact, I would recommend this YouTube video that's on the left here. I'll make sure that's in the description. But from this, we want to ask it something. If you can look on the left hand side, you can see this "How do we create a paragraph in Obsidian?" And so what this will then do when you file this off, it will find the context of whatever markdown file it finds appropriate and it will respond with a little tiny snippet that tells me about whatever it is that I'm asking. Um, so it says, "Based on your notes, to create a paragraph in Obsidian, you need to press Enter twice. Specifically, your notes mention..." and then it gives you the actual context. Now this is kind of cool, but it's very basic at this point. But what I want to show you is something very, very interesting because we're not even in the same file. And I want to ask, how are we able to handle blurs, Sanity image? So, how do we handle blur Sanity image? And now why is this interesting specifically is because there's not all that much information out there about Sanity image and blurs, but more specifically there's no information about how we do it in house. Now you can see here, this is actually how we do it in house. We use the Sanity image URL four, we set a width of 100, a height of 100, and we blur it to 300. So there's no real performance cost by taking this image. And then from there we actually use an overflow and we get this blur large and scale 110. Now because this note exists, and you'll see the difference here, so if I hit "Handling blurs on the web," you'll see that this looks totally different to the version that Smart Connections passed this back. And this is because it's essentially taking all that information from my document and then running it through, in this case, Claude 3.5, and giving us a very interesting, you know, kind of more context-accurate response, which is incredible. Um, you might be asking essentially how much does all of this cost, and the answer is pretty much nothing because the person that's building this obviously works from donations and upgrading the account. But ultimately, you're bringing your own API key and he's essentially just built the tool to be able to work with Obsidian community plugins. So what I would advise doing is if you are going to use this tool, go ahead and say hi to Brian, who is one of the creators of the tool, and upgrade and pay for the extra bit to be able to get the latest version. But yeah, it's an incredible tool. I'd highly recommend it. It's been something that we've been trying to do for months and months and months on end, and this, as far as I'm concerned, is the best thing out there to be able to handle offline, online AI functionality and be able to get context from your documentation. So yeah, hope that helps. Have a great day. Take care. Bye. ## Frequently asked questions ### Does Obsidian have AI? Yes. Obsidian itself does not ship with AI features, but it has a rich plugin ecosystem with several AI options. Smart Connections is one of the most popular, letting you chat with your notes using whichever model you choose. ### What does the Smart Connections plugin do? Smart Connections embeds your Obsidian notes and lets you have a conversation with them. It uses retrieval to pull the most relevant notes into context, then sends that context to your chosen AI model so you can ask questions and get answers grounded in your own writing. ### Can I chat with my Obsidian notes? Yes. With Smart Connections installed, you can open a chat panel inside Obsidian and ask questions about your vault. Answers cite the notes they were drawn from, so you can jump back to the source whenever you want. ### Which AI models work with Smart Connections? Smart Connections supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and local models through Ollama. You pick the one you want to use and provide the API key in the plugin settings. ### How do I set up an AI chatbot in Obsidian? Install the Smart Connections plugin from the Obsidian community plugin browser, enable it, then add an API key for whichever AI model you want to use. Once embeddings finish generating, the chat panel becomes available from the sidebar. ### Is Smart Connections free? The plugin itself is free and open source. The cost depends on the AI model you connect to it. Usage of OpenAI or Anthropic incurs API charges, while running a local model through Ollama has no per-query cost. ## Related services - https://robotostudio.com/services/markdown - https://robotostudio.com/services/agentic-workflows