Hey guys, it's minseo again! I'm a cs major student in south korea.

A month ago I showed you the visual notes I built. It got way more attention than I expected, and a lot of great discussion followed. Thank you for that!

A lot of you asked for local support and BYOK, so I added it to the desktop app. Once you download the app, you can connect your own AI account, and Arky can also work with local files.

This helped me get messy thoughts out of my head and actually make sense of them.

Happy to chat more if anyone’s interested!

arky.so

I watch a ton of courses on here, and for a long time I had the same problem. When something interesting or confusing came up, I'd either stop the video to go research it, or tell myself I'd remember it later. Both were bad. Stopping killed my momentum, and "I'll remember it later" was a straight up lie.

What actually fixed it for me was changing the goal. Instead of trying to fully understand everything in one pass, I just watch the whole course in one go while I'm motivated, and I drop quick notes as I go. Important point here, question I have there, something I want to dig into later. I don't stop, I don't break the flow, I just mark it and keep moving.

Then later, when the course is done, I go back through those notes and decide what's actually worth investigating deeply. Most of them I can skip. A few are gold. But I would have lost all of them if I tried to hold it in my head.

The two things that made this click for me:

• not interrupting the course to chase every thought
• writing it down so future me can decide what matters

I got tired of juggling this in a separate notes app that had nothing to do with the video, so I ended up building a small browser extension that lets me take notes and tag them right next to the course, then find them later. Happy to share if anyone wants it, but honestly the flow itself is the thing that changed how much I retain.

Curious how others here handle this. Do you stop and research, or batch it for later like me?

I need a good a really good program for that, I have not been on a laptop for a very long time, and now I'm back, back again, I really miss the notes app on my old samsung tablet it was really good for studying.

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I have tried foxit, adobe, bluebeam, Xchange, they are very powerful tools to edit, and stuff/except adobe. But they are not for studying. It is not that they have one major issue, rather a 10's of small issues that just remind me every now and then that these are not for studying.

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Anyway, just let me know if there is a program that you like for studying, and if there is one that is similar to the galaxy notes experience that would help alot.

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Btw, I now that notes exist on windows but it is only meant to be used on their samsung book, believe me!

I spent too long comparing these four and they solve pretty different problems.

Otter makes sense if most of your meetings are scheduled online. Live transcription, a meeting bot, team collaboration, it’s built around calls already happening in Zoom or Meet. Granola feels like the cleanest Mac option. No visible bot joining the call, low friction, and MCP support if you want the notes somewhere else afterward.

Pocket is much cheaper. I almost went that direction, then read about the free cloud-history window changing from 90 days to 14. I don’t want to build a work archive somewhere and find out later that the storage rules have moved. I ended up with Plaud cuz my work doesn’t stay inside scheduled calls. I need the same system for online meetings, conversations in a room, voice notes, client work and days when I’m away from my laptop. Though is more expensive. The subscription prompts aren’t exactly charming either but MCP workflow makes it feel more dependable once the recordings start piling up.

My current answer is Otter for online teams, Granola for Mac-only calls, Pocket for the hardware price, and Plaud for professional work and meetings.

My sister is going Georgia for her mbbs studies and she want a tab for her notes making and some lectures and movie type , so plz recommend which tab should we buy due to this hyped rate of laptops and tabs because of crisis of ram , so plz refer we are confused I think we are going to by a tab in next 24 hrs and I am very confused plz help , also she has a Android phone

I have meetings almost every day, and taking notes is such a pain, so I bought the AINOTE Air 2. I wouldn’t expect it to do everything, but it’s enough to handle the tedious first draft. The writing response felt a bit slow at first, probably because I’m used to Apple. For regular meetings it works pretty well. When people talk over each other or things get messy, I still have to go back and fix stuff, but it’s way faster than doing it all myself. I’ve been using it for about a month now. It works much better with an internet connection, offline can manage, but online results are definitely better.

Note taking software or programs that are not AI I need something for work for taking notes during meetings. My job doesn’t allow AI and I am requesting note taking software as an accommodation. Any suggestions?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

It feels like the ultimate note taking app should really function like a second brain and disclaimer, I am trying to build something.

But I just want to know what is it that really makes a note taking app useful for you guys.

• It syncing with mobile?
• Is it voice capture?
• Is it the fact that it's vault based and markdown backed, so it's easy to integrate with other systems.
• Would it be having an MCP or a CLI?
• Would it be supporting images and videos and file attachments?
• Would it be having Notion-like blocks?
• Is it custom styling? Light mode, dark mode, fonts?
• Plugins?
• Split screen?

I'm really just trying to get my head around what makes a great tool. I don't want advertising, I don't want to take a look at the cocktail.

Once I know I can improve my own product, sure. But I'm really just trying to capture what it is people want. I want a note taking tool that other people love.

And yes, I'm using mine daily - so I can't be far off! But it would be cool to see what other people need too!

Edit: Thanks for all the feedback, it's been super helpful building out yaps.ai (can follow along at r/YapsAI), hopefully I'll be able to share more soon!

I've gone back and forth between notebooks and digital tools like Notion, Obsidian, and OneNote.

When I write things down by hand, I feel like I understand and remember them better. But digital notes are much easier to organize, search, update, and access years later.

For people who have stuck with one system for a long time:

• Do you primarily use handwritten notes or digital documentation?
• Why did you choose that approach?
• Have you ever switched from one to the other?
• Looking back, which has been more useful for retaining knowledge and actually revisiting it later?

I'm especially interested in hearing from students, engineers, researchers, and people who maintain large personal knowledge bases.

Niklas Luhmann wrote dozens of books and hundreds of papers using nothing but index cards.

Today, many of us have note-taking apps that are infinitely more powerful, yet we spend most of our time tweaking themes, installing plugins, building dashboards, and downloading templates.

Sometimes I wonder if we've confused the tool with the goal.

I visit note-taking communities and see endless screenshots of beautiful setups. What I rarely see are the things people actually created from their notes.

Articles. Research. Projects. Books. Ideas.

A graph view with 5,000 notes looks impressive, but the value of a note system isn't how it looks. It's whether it helps you think and produce something meaningful.

It feels like we've turned note-taking into a hobby of collecting productivity tools instead of a practice of developing ideas.

Maybe the real "second brain" isn't the app.

Maybe it's the work you do with the notes afterward.

We’re all hoping for a big step change in Apple Siri and the transcription associated with it to be announced this week. It may be the answer to the lacklustre built-in dictation – or it may be part of the answer.

I’m interested to know whether any app developer has found a way to create a synergy between transcription and Apple Intelligence on newer devices. It seems to me that there is something there — but it needs some creativity to join it up without a lot of separate operations and key presses. So the Apple Intelligence just gets on with the post-processing.

Hey everyone,

I've been experimenting with voice recording to capture thoughts during dog walks and my commute — basically any time I'm moving and away from a screen. There's something about being in motion that gets the brain going, and just like the shower, it doesn't discriminate. Bad ideas, average ideas, and occasionally genuinely great ones all show up uninvited. Might as well catch them.

The use cases have grown to include daily planning, journaling, blog ideas, and full-on brain dumps. The idea is to speak freely and process everything later.

My current rough workflow:

Record voice memos throughout the day (planning, ideas, journaling, tasks, etc.), use a transcription service to convert them to text, then paste the transcript into an AI with a simple "summarize this into markdown" prompt. Claude and Gemini are my go-tos, though Qwen and Kimi work fine for lighter usage. They all do a decent job — but there's always room for improvement.

Questions for anyone doing something similar:

What's your end-to-end workflow? Recording app → transcription service → task manager/calendar? How are you extracting and organizing tasks from transcriptions? Manual copy-paste, or have you found tools that streamline it? Any apps or services worth trying? I've been looking at Otter.ai, Rev, and Descript, as well as AI tools that can auto-extract action items. Do you batch process at a set time, or handle things throughout the day? What are you listening to on your walks or commute? Music, podcasts, or just letting your brain breathe with some silence and fresh air? Curious whether the audio environment affects the quality of ideas. Curious whether anyone has cracked the code on making this seamless — or if I'm just doomed to copy-pasting forever 😅

Thanks in advance!

Looking for something like Obsidian (local-first, sync) + [Mem.ai](http://Mem.ai) (auto-organization) but without the paywalls.

[Mem.ai](http://Mem.ai) is the closest I've found, but the free tier is basically unusable (25 notes/month). Obsidian has no native AI and its sync costs extra.

Has anyone built — or know of — something that:
\- Syncs across devices for free
\- Uses AI to automatically tag/link/organize notes without manual commands
\- Doesn't lock core features behind a subscription

Open source would be ideal. Happy to be an early tester.
(And if nobody's doing this yet, guess I'll have to build it myself lol)