PlanOpticon

planopticon / docs / use-cases.md

Use Cases

PlanOpticon is built for anyone who needs to turn unstructured content — recordings, documents, notes, web pages — into structured, searchable, actionable knowledge. Here are the most common ways people use it.


Meeting notes and follow-ups

Problem: You have hours of meeting recordings but no time to rewatch them. Action items get lost, decisions are forgotten, and new team members have no way to catch up.

Solution: Point PlanOpticon at your recordings and get structured transcripts, action items with assignees and deadlines, key decisions, and a knowledge graph linking people to topics.

# Analyze a single meeting recording
planopticon analyze -i standup-2026-03-07.mp4 -o ./meetings/march-7

# Process a month of recordings at once
planopticon batch -i ./recordings/march -o ./meetings --title "March 2026 Meetings"

# Query what was decided
planopticon query "What decisions were made about the API redesign?"

# Find all action items assigned to Alice
planopticon query "relationships --source Alice"

What you get:

  • Full transcript with timestamps and speaker segments
  • Action items extracted with assignees, deadlines, and context
  • Key points and decisions highlighted
  • Knowledge graph connecting people, topics, technologies, and decisions
  • Markdown report you can share with the team

Next steps: Export to your team's wiki or note system:

# Push to GitHub wiki
planopticon wiki generate --input ./meetings --output ./wiki
planopticon wiki push --input ./wiki --target "github://your-org/your-repo"

# Export to Obsidian for personal knowledge management
planopticon export obsidian --input ./meetings --output ~/Obsidian/Meetings

Research processing

Problem: You're researching a topic across YouTube talks, arXiv papers, blog posts, and podcasts. Information is scattered and hard to cross-reference.

Solution: Ingest everything into a single knowledge graph, then query across all sources.

# Ingest a YouTube conference talk
planopticon ingest "https://youtube.com/watch?v=..." --output ./research

# Ingest arXiv papers
planopticon ingest "https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12345" --output ./research

# Ingest blog posts and documentation
planopticon ingest "https://example.com/blog/post" --output ./research

# Ingest local PDF papers
planopticon ingest ./papers/ --output ./research --recursive

# Now query across everything
planopticon query "What approaches to vector search were discussed?"
planopticon query "entities --type technology"
planopticon query "neighbors TransformerArchitecture"

What you get:

  • A unified knowledge graph merging entities across all sources
  • Cross-references showing where the same concept appears in different sources
  • Searchable entity index by type (people, technologies, concepts, papers)
  • Relationship maps showing how ideas connect

Go deeper with the companion:

planopticon companion --kb ./research
planopticon> What are the main approaches to retrieval-augmented generation?
planopticon> /entities --type technology
planopticon> /neighbors RAG
planopticon> /export obsidian

Knowledge gathering across platforms

Problem: Your team's knowledge is spread across Google Docs, Notion, Obsidian, GitHub wikis, and Apple Notes. There's no single place to search everything.

Solution: Pull from all sources into one knowledge graph.

# Authenticate with your platforms
planopticon auth google
planopticon auth notion
planopticon auth github

# Ingest from Google Workspace
planopticon gws ingest --folder-id abc123 --output ./kb --recursive

# Ingest from Notion
planopticon ingest --source notion --output ./kb

# Ingest from an Obsidian vault
planopticon ingest ~/Obsidian/WorkVault --output ./kb --recursive

# Ingest from GitHub wikis and READMEs
planopticon ingest "github://your-org/project-a" --output ./kb
planopticon ingest "github://your-org/project-b" --output ./kb

# Query the unified knowledge base
planopticon query stats
planopticon query "entities --type person"
planopticon query "What do we know about the authentication system?"

What you get:

  • Merged knowledge graph with provenance tracking (you can see which source each entity came from)
  • Deduplicated entities across platforms (same concept mentioned in Notion and Google Docs gets merged)
  • Full-text search across all ingested content
  • Relationship maps showing how concepts connect across your organization's documents

Team onboarding

Problem: New team members spend weeks reading docs, watching recorded meetings, and asking questions to get up to speed.

Solution: Build a knowledge base from existing content and let new people explore it conversationally.

# Build the knowledge base from everything
planopticon batch -i ./recordings/onboarding -o ./kb --title "Team Onboarding"
planopticon ingest ./docs/ --output ./kb --recursive
planopticon ingest ./architecture-decisions/ --output ./kb --recursive

# New team member launches the companion
planopticon companion --kb ./kb
planopticon> What is the overall architecture of the system?
planopticon> Who are the key people on the team?
planopticon> /entities --type technology
planopticon> What was the rationale for choosing PostgreSQL over MongoDB?
planopticon> /neighbors AuthenticationService
planopticon> What are the main open issues or risks?

What you get:

  • Interactive Q&A over the entire team knowledge base
  • Entity exploration — browse people, technologies, services, decisions
  • Relationship navigation — "show me everything connected to the payment system"
  • No need to rewatch hours of recordings

Data collection and synthesis

Problem: You need to collect and synthesize information from many sources — customer interviews, competitor analysis, market research — into a coherent picture.

Solution: Batch process recordings and documents, then use the planning agent to generate synthesis artifacts.

# Process customer interview recordings
planopticon batch -i ./interviews -o ./research --title "Customer Interviews Q1"

# Ingest competitor documentation
planopticon ingest ./competitor-analysis/ --output ./research --recursive

# Ingest market research PDFs
planopticon ingest ./market-reports/ --output ./research --recursive

# Use the planning agent to synthesize
planopticon agent --kb ./research --interactive
planopticon> Generate a summary of common customer pain points
planopticon> /plan
planopticon> /tasks
planopticon> /export markdown

What you get:

  • Merged knowledge graph across all interviews and documents
  • Cross-referenced entities showing which customers mentioned which features
  • Agent-generated project plans, PRDs, and task breakdowns based on the data
  • Exportable artifacts for sharing with stakeholders

Content creation from video

Problem: You have video content (lectures, tutorials, webinars) that you want to turn into written documentation, blog posts, or course materials.

Solution: Extract structured knowledge and export it in your preferred format.

# Analyze the video
planopticon analyze -i webinar-recording.mp4 -o ./content

# Generate multiple document types (no LLM needed for these)
planopticon export markdown --input ./content --output ./docs

# Export to Obsidian for further editing
planopticon export obsidian --input ./content --output ~/Obsidian/Content

What you get for each video:

  • Full transcript (JSON, plain text, SRT subtitles)
  • Extracted diagrams reproduced as Mermaid/SVG/PNG
  • Charts reproduced with data tables
  • Knowledge graph of concepts and relationships
  • 7 types of markdown documents: summary, meeting notes, glossary, relationship map, status report, entity index, CSV data

Decision tracking over time

Problem: Important decisions are made in meetings but never formally recorded. Months later, nobody remembers why a choice was made.

Solution: Process meeting recordings continuously and query the growing knowledge graph for decisions and their context.

# Process each week's recordings
planopticon batch -i ./recordings/week-12 -o ./decisions --title "Week 12"

# The knowledge graph grows over time — entities merge across weeks
planopticon query "entities --type goal"
planopticon query "entities --type risk"
planopticon query "entities --type milestone"

# Find decisions about a specific topic
planopticon query "What was decided about the database migration?"

# Track risks over time
planopticon query "relationships --type risk"

The planning taxonomy automatically classifies entities as goals, requirements, risks, tasks, and milestones — giving you a structured view of project evolution over time.


Zoom / Teams / Meet integration

Problem: Meeting recordings are sitting in Zoom/Teams/Meet cloud storage. You want to process them without manually downloading each one.

Solution: Authenticate once, list recordings, and process them directly.

# Authenticate with your meeting platform
planopticon auth zoom
# or: planopticon auth microsoft
# or: planopticon auth google

# List recent recordings
planopticon recordings zoom-list
planopticon recordings teams-list --from 2026-01-01
planopticon recordings meet-list --limit 20

# Process recordings (download + analyze)
planopticon analyze -i "zoom://recording-id" -o ./output

Setup requirements:

Platform What you need
Zoom ZOOM_CLIENT_ID + ZOOM_CLIENT_SECRET (create an OAuth app at marketplace.zoom.us)
Teams MICROSOFT_CLIENT_ID + MICROSOFT_CLIENT_SECRET (register an Azure AD app)
Meet GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID + GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET (create OAuth credentials in Google Cloud Console)

See the Authentication guide for detailed setup instructions.


Fully offline processing

Problem: You're working with sensitive content that can't leave your network, or you simply don't want to pay for API calls.

Solution: Use Ollama for local AI processing with no external API calls.

# Install Ollama and pull models
ollama pull llama3.2       # Chat/analysis
ollama pull llava          # Vision (diagram detection)

# Install local Whisper for transcription
pip install planopticon[gpu]

# Process entirely offline
planopticon analyze -i sensitive-meeting.mp4 -o ./output --provider ollama

PlanOpticon auto-detects Ollama when it's running. If no cloud API keys are configured, it uses Ollama automatically. Pair with local Whisper transcription for a fully air-gapped pipeline.


Competitive research

Problem: You want to systematically analyze competitor content — conference talks, documentation, blog posts — and identify patterns.

Solution: Ingest competitor content from multiple sources and query for patterns.

# Ingest competitor conference talks from YouTube
planopticon ingest "https://youtube.com/watch?v=competitor-talk-1" --output ./competitive
planopticon ingest "https://youtube.com/watch?v=competitor-talk-2" --output ./competitive

# Ingest their documentation
planopticon ingest "https://competitor.com/docs" --output ./competitive

# Ingest their GitHub repos
planopticon auth github
planopticon ingest "github://competitor/main-product" --output ./competitive

# Analyze patterns
planopticon query "entities --type technology"
planopticon query "What technologies are competitors investing in?"
planopticon companion --kb ./competitive
planopticon> What are the common architectural patterns across competitors?
planopticon> /entities --type technology
planopticon> Which technologies appear most frequently?
planopticon> /export markdown

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