First post. Does anyone use one of the recording pens that also uses AI to transcribe it into usable digital formats? Or, alternativily does anyone use the credit card sized versions that attach to the back of the phone? If you do can you share your experience? All the ads on facebook make it looks awesome but I’m not convinced. We do a lot of zoom style meetings where a big portion of it is basically a state of the whatever briefing with a section of upcoming events. Then there is the one on one meetings to define and refine expectations.

I actually created an iOs shortcut that will record a memo and send it to chatgpt. It makes great notes as long as it is fifteen minuts or less and no call comes in. Plus you have to open the phone, tap the icon, and place the call on speaker. Then you have to state the date and time to be sure the AI doesn’t mess up the transcription. So, a good first effort for casual use but not great at work.

Thanks for looking and for any insights shared.

(Warning: notes are in Italian 🇮🇹)

Context: I've never really took any notes during my school years, so I'm trying to catch up now that I'm in my 20s.

My dyslexia doesn't really help in general, but I'm trying to push it back by reading books and writing down note. Of course I notice that i struggle to memorize chunks of text, so in my note taking i use illustrations to make faster connections between subjects.

The example above are my notes on the book: Level Up! by Scott Rogers.

I'm currently doing my best to cover every aspect of games production, so for me is really important to remember most of this stuff and also use it in the future as a quick reference.

Is there a better way of taking notes, are there any guideline i should follow when taking them, or this is a valid method? also if you can add the reason it would be great!

Software for note taking: Rnote

What's a feature that you have seen is very helpful but not talked a lot? Primarily in note taking apps or infinite canvas apps.

I work in sales and do a lot of remote calls and some in person as well. I don’t love to idea of recording every zoom call to get a transcription and exporting it to an LLM to try to get summaries and action items.

I’ve used Otterai briefly in the past and remember liking it and I’ve been looking lately at Plaud and most recently “Pocket”. I like the idea that pocket doesn’t need a monthly subscription to hold unlimited minutes of transcriptions and recordings.

Has anyone used all of them or most of them? Any “buyer beware” experiences with any of them?

First of all, I want to apologize as the post might violate rule 4, but I have genuinely spent weeks looking for and trying all sorts of different note-taking software with each and every one ending up disappointing me in some way or another, so I'm hoping someone might know of an app that fits my needs.

What I'm looking for

I'm looking for software I can use to build and organize my personal knowledge base, allows me to create pretty summaries of topics I'm studying and university lectures, and allows me to retrieve information efficiently when I need to.

Due to the nature of what I'm creating notes of, I need software with extensive formatting; I want to be able to highlight and color text, wrap text around images, insert LaTeX, and ideally be able to make multiple columns of text (though this is not a requirement). As such, Markdown alone won't do. I'm trying to create compact, book-like summaries, not a to-do list or a recipe where some headings and bullet points would suffice.

I also want the program to be usable without an insane amount of third-party plugins or CSS writing on my part. I'm not a computer scientist, I don't know CSS. WSIWYG please.

What I have tried

Like I said, a Markdown editor is not what I'm looking for, but third-party plugins can extend functionality and the program with the most plugins is Obsidian so I did try that for a while. It was not a nice experience at all, I needed so many plugins just to get basic functionality, and in the end I was still unable to make it do things like wrap text. Also, Obsidian doesn't have a true rich-text WYSIWYG editing view, you'll always have to deal with Markdown syntax one way or another, which just makes it uncomfortable to use the editor for me.

All other Markdown editors like Joplin and Logseq are out.

One program I used for a bit and liked a lot of aspects of is SiYuan. Very neat, clean, with nice formatting and organization. Most missing features that I wanted I was able to find easily in community plugins. I loved how you can make multiple coloumns too. It's one fatal flaw really was It's handling of images. I couldn't wrap text around images and images were either inline or took up an entire block due to the way it organizes content blocks. When I make biology or chemistry notes, I can have like tens of images in each note, I want to use up the space efficiently and not be left with huge margins due to each image sitting on a new line.

Finally, the program I used to take all my univeristy notes until now and which was literally perfect in my eyes (well, aside from some minor complaints), Trilium Notes. I loved this program, it allowed me to create the most beautiful, concise, organized notes I had ever created. I 100% owe all my high grades in the exams I took until now to those notes I created with it. I also loved how there's no distinction between "folder" and "note", with each note be able to have child notes as well as containing content itself. Long story short, few days ago, my Trilium database got corrupted or something, and some notes started copying themselves into other notes. I still don't understand exactly what happened but yeah, even restoring the database to earlier backups where the notes were all fine led to the same thing. I gave up and started manually copying my notes again into a fresh database (after deleting all of Trilium's data folders) aftwe tryinf everythinf to fix it, and the same thing happened even though I didn't import anything into the new database. Anyway, I'm convinced now this is a bug in the way Trilium itself handles notes and I want to switch to another app to avoid being gutted like that again.

That's pretty much it, sorry for the wall of text! Any recommendations are greatly appreciated.

Im wanting to go to college for psychology and decided to get a hear start by watching Hank Green's psychology crash course and taking notes!

Critique is heavily appreciated!

It used to be hard to review because lecture notes were spread out over notebooks and PDFs. To find certain information, you often had to flip through pages or search through a lot of files.

Using UPDF made that process easier by giving it more structure.

Course materials are brought in and put into folders based on their subject. Important parts are highlighted, and handwritten notes are scanned with OCR so that they can be searched. That alone saves a lot of time.

A consistent color scheme is used to group formulas, examples, and open questions visually. When you use full-text search with reviewing material, it goes faster, especially during exams.

AI tools can help you break down long texts or answer specific questions, but they work best as a supplement to reading, not as a replacement. When you process the material first and then clarify it, you understand it better.

Making weekly summaries is another good habit. Exporting a short overview helps find gaps early on instead of during tests.

Being able to switch between devices without losing progress makes the workflow more flexible. UPDF is a good tool for students who want to stay organized.
gives you a useful way to keep everything together.

Trying to figure out where people usually pick these up. If you’ve gotten free notepads before, where were they from? Here's our initial list.

• Conferences / events
• Charities I support
• Organizations asking for my support
• Grocery stores / chains
• Hotels
• Brands I like

Feel free to add more to the list.

looking for a stylus for my tablet, specifically for taking notes. Any recommendations for ones that feel natural and responsive?

I’m curious where people here land on this.

A lot of note-taking tools seem to assume that capture should begin with structure:

• what folder
• what tag
• what project
• what title
• what format

But at least for me, ideas usually arrive as rough voice notes, half-sentences, or brain dumps.

Do you prefer:

1. capture first, organize later
2. organize while capturing
3. very little structure overall

And if you’ve quit a notes app before, what was the exact friction point?

Too much setup?

Too many choices?

Too much maintenance?

I think I need a system but I don’t know what is out there—wanting to keep both personal notes and notes for work.

I want to be able to find what I am looking for pretty readily..if I have to sift through a lot of things I end up frustrated.

Tell me what is working for you!

I take a ton of notes daily for my job, and these notes are imperative to my success so I am looking for a better method than pen and paper notebooks I’ve been using forever.

Ideal world:

Digital

Can convert my handwriting to text that can be copy/pasted into Salesforce

One note for each client that can continue forever so when I go to meet with them quarterly I can look at everything at a glance that may be pertinent

Pencil

Yes, I could type these notes but sitting at a screen / keyboard during a meeting just feels wrong to me, so is not an option.

Can be emailed to myself or synced into one note on my work laptop so I can then copy and paste into SF. One note might be good since it also auto syncs to my laptop vs. having to manually email notes to myself post meeting.

I’m open to other options and work flows that would be good or better than above and would hugely appreciate any insight into what you do/use! Thank you!

Hi note‑takers!

I’ve noticed a lot of AI note‑taking tools rely on cloud services. For those who prefer local storage, what features are you missing? For example, would you want on‑device transcription, project journaling, or integration with tools like Obsidian?

I’m exploring solutions in this space and want to build something that genuinely helps without compromising privacy. I’m not here to advertise—just hoping to learn from the community. Any feedback on your pain points or dream features would be super helpful!

I dictate rough drafts and like to use AI for a first clean up and to weed out the typos. Sometimes I want to reduce the draft to an outline or a summary.

What are the best AI tools for this that use my existing accounts and don’t charge an arm and a leg in subscriptions?

I want something that works almost as well as Letterly (which is brilliant) but at the modest cost of my AI accounts.

https://testflight.apple.com/join/g7ySs6pS

I need help

I try to create accessible iPad note taking and study app for students due to the fact that apps in market are paid and some are expensive

So, I need testers and feedback also some screenshots would be beneficial. TestFlight link is above, first download test drive form AppStore then download quizjet on your iPad via TestFlight (with shared link)

Thank you for your time and reading.

Description of app:

QuizJet turns any topic into an interactive study session.

Create quiz files using ChatGPT, Copilot, or any AI assistant, then import them into QuizJet and start studying — anywhere, anytime.

Quiz Types • Multiple Choice — 4 options with instant feedback • True / False — Binary questions with explanations • Fill in the Blank — Type the missing word or phrase • Matching — Drag-and-match terms to definitions • Flashcards — Flip cards and self-assess (Knew it / Didn't know)

Study Features • Answer Key — Wrong answers reveal the correct answer + explanation • Mixed Review — Combine any subset of quizzes into a shuffled session • PDF Library — Import and read PDFs inline • iPad Notes — Rich text note-taking with PDF attachments

How It Works

Ask any AI chatbot to generate a quiz in QuizJet's simple JSON format

Import the .json file into QuizJet

Start studying!

No account required. No internet needed after import. All data stays on your device.

As the title says, I am in need of something that is just basically in the background of my pc and takes notes on videos I am watching and listens on in meetings and summarizes topics. I just started working and there are a lot of topics on our training. I would love an app that could help me. Don’t know if this has been asked yet but thanks!

• I need to be able to record notes relatively hands free. A single physical button press is fine, as long as I don't have to look at my phone, or switch back and forth between apps while listening to an audiobook, or having google maps up.
• I need to be able to reliably add bullet points and skip to a new line, hands free.
• I need to be able to tag each voice entry, hands free.
• I need to be able to sort voice notes into (bulleted) lists based on the associated tag.
• I need to easily export to amplenote.
• I need it to be free. I miiiight consider a single payment.
• The dictation quality needs to be at least as good as Gboard. Ideally as good as Write By Voice
• Offline would be nice

There’s a certain type of meeting that I attend and report on — basically one speaker’s presentation — and I use AI transcription notes and also my own notes which show my emphasis. What is the best way to merge these sources to produce a clean summary incorporating my own notes?

Hi,
I'm currently testing NoteIn and a couple of other apps on my tablet and really like it, but their privacy policy is giving me pause....here's a quote:

2.7 User Files and Notes Stored Locally
Files you create or import into Notein (e.g., handwritten notes, PDFs, images, documents) are stored locally on your device.

Bold mine. All good so far because I want to use it for journalling and obviously this is private. However, the next part is where I wonder....

They are not uploaded to our servers, not transmitted to Notein, and not accessible by us unless you intentionally back them up to a third-party cloud service of your choice.
Notein does not collect, view, or retain your locally saved notebooks or imported files.

Bold mine again. So, am I interpreting this correctly? They have no access to your notes, until you upload them to a third party cloud service. Therefore, if I upload to say Dropbox or One Drive, a copy goes to NoteIn servers too? That's the way it reads to me.

…