20: Watch Folders and Automation - transcript
Jessica: The QUILL Cast, episode twenty. I'm Jessica. Today, a short and delightfully practical one: watch folders, or teaching QUILL to work while you're elsewhere.
Liam: I'm Liam. The concept in one sentence: a watch folder is a folder QUILL monitors, and when a matching file appears in it, QUILL acts, automatically.
Jessica: The simplest setup is the auto-opener. Point a watch profile at your downloads folder or your scanner's output folder, and new documents open in QUILL as they arrive. Your scanner finishes, and by the time you've walked back to the desk, the document is a tab.
Liam: Setup lives under the watch folder settings: pick the folder, optionally include subfolders, choose what file types match, and enable. There's also a process existing files switch, off by default, which decides whether QUILL should handle files already sitting in the folder or only genuinely new arrivals. Worth knowing because a freshly enabled profile deliberately waits for new files, that's by design, not a bug.
Jessica: Now the power version: watch actions. A profile can do more than open, it can run a pipeline. The flagship combination lands in episode twenty-four properly, but here's the preview: attach a transcription action, and every audio recording dropped in the folder becomes a transcript document. Attach a transcript action on top, and it becomes meeting minutes. Recorder syncs to folder; you come back to minutes, not audio.
Liam: And pair it with episode eighteen: a scanner dropping image PDFs into a watched folder, with the rescue pipeline downstream. The physical mail-to-readable-text assembly line, built from two features holding hands.
Jessica: The safety posture, because automation earns extra scrutiny here. Watch folders are off by default, like everything with initiative. Safe Mode disables them entirely, your clean-room guarantee includes no background automation. And actions announce and record what they did, the notification list from episode four keeps the receipts, so automation never becomes mystery.
Liam: Boundaries worth respecting as you design your setup: watch the folders that receive things, downloads, scanner output, recorder sync, phone camera sync, rather than folders you actively work in. The pattern is inbox processing: stuff arrives, QUILL preprocesses, you do the human part. Don't point automation at your live projects; point it at your loading dock.
Jessica: A few real setups from the community to steal. The scanning station we mentioned. The lecture pipeline: phone records class, syncs to a folder, transcripts wait after dinner. The clippings drawer: a watched folder where you toss downloaded articles all week, each opening and queueing for reading. And the shared drop: a network folder colleagues drop files into, QUILL picks them up on your side.
Liam: Homework, one setup. Pick your genuine inbox folder, downloads for most people, create a watch profile for document types you actually receive, and live with it for a week. Then drop one new file in and enjoy the small magic of the tab that opens itself.
Jessica: That closes the documents-and-files part of the course. Next episode begins part four, speech, starting with the voice catalog: reading aloud in everything from DECtalk to the neural voices narrating this very sentence.
Liam: I'm Liam.
Jessica: I'm Jessica. Let the folder do the fetching.