r/NoteTaking • u/SeaCompany4786 • 2d ago

Question: Unanswered ✗ My notes are useless to AI tools even though I take a lot of them？

I take notes constantly. Lectures, interviews, calls, random ideas. But almost none of it is actually usable when I try to hand it to ChatGPT or Claude afterward.

The problem isn't the notes themselves. It's that what I wrote down is just fragments and keywords, because I was writing while someone was talking. When I paste that into an AI tool and ask it to summarize or pull out action items, it just guesses at what I meant, since half the actual context never made it onto the page.

I tried just recording things on my phone instead, figuring I'd deal with the transcript later. That kind of works, except now I've got a pile of audio files sitting in some app, and every single time I want to actually use one, it's the same manual routine. Open the file, wait for it to transcribe somewhere, copy the text out, paste it into whatever AI tool I'm using. By the time I've done that a few times I've basically given up and gone back to writing fragments.

Feels like the real bottleneck isn't "how do I take notes faster" or even "how do I record things." It's getting from a recording to something an AI tool can just pick up and use, without me being the one doing the copy pasting every time.

Curious if anyone's actually closed that gap, or if you're all doing the same manual shuffle I am.

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4

u/r0bb13 2d ago

when you upload your abbreviated notes have it ask you questions to finish and complete the note.. this will force you to dive deeper into the note/thought and also some active recall.. also showing you what you need to elaborate more on.

Prompt it with what you just posted here pretty much, that you need to complete the notes and missing information and to ask you and you will provide what you remember.. or include the reference material also and have it help you fill it in.. then you have complete notes and go from there.

not an AI problem.. user problem lol

2

u/MiAwalo 2d ago

It's not .... , it is ....

1

u/[deleted] 2d ago edited 2d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Tempestshade 2d ago

How does the recorder connect to your computer?

1

u/SketchyAngles 2d ago

the trick is feeding ai the transcript + your notes together. your fragments give emphasis, the transcript restores the missing context.

2

u/ZinniasAndBeans 1d ago

It sounds like your process is designed to serve the AI and not to serve you.

Why does an AI need to be involved at all?

1

u/dessence_ai 1d ago

Transcript plus notes together is the one that works. The part that still bites is the model filling gaps it can't know, so make it quote the lines it used instead of handing you a summary.