AI

Google’s NotebookLM is an AI-powered research assistant that helps you analyse your own content in almost any format, including Google Docs, PDFs, videos, and audio files. You create virtual notebooks for each topic or research area, then upload relevant documents. NotebookLM creates a custom dataset (or searchable knowledge base) from those files that you can then query. Unlike other chatbots, the responses are based on the content that you provided. And those responses include citations to the original passages - you know exactly where that answer has come from. The other big advantage of NotebookLM is that it can handle up to fifty 500,000-word documents. That’s a total of 25m words! Even if you’re a prolific note-taker like me, you’d struggle to exceed its capacity. ...

Although I have mixed feelings about the advent of AI, improved transcription tools have made my life a lot easier. Dictating rather than typing is much better for my creaky body, and it’s incredibly quick to generate high quality transcripts and captions for videos. A few years ago, it would take me almost a week to transcribe the content for an online course - now it’s less than an hour. ...

When I did my PhD, I had notes in about 15 different places. I mostly got away with it, because I was younger and had the energy to charge around the house in pursuit of a specific source. Nowadays, I have to adopt a more dignified approach. Fortunately, Readwise is here to help me. Readwise makes it easy to capture, organise, and revisit highlights from whatever you’re reading, whether that’s ebooks, articles, or physical books. You can also add comments while you highlight, so you’re less likely to forget those important insights. ...

I always start with good intentions when I’m reading: “This time, I’ll take careful notes as I go along, rather than imagining I’ll somehow remember the important bits.” In reality, I’m trying to balance a cup of tea and book, so can’t possibly manage my writing materials, too. Happily, AudioPen has solved at least one of my problems. AudioPen is an AI-based app that turns your voice notes into structured, edited text. Any repetitions or ums and ahhs are automatically eliminated, and it adds all the punctuation. That two-minute ramble is turned into a perfectly respectable paragraph. You can then organise your transcribed notes with folders and tags. For instance, you might have a folder for a specific research project, then a tag for each related book or article you read. It’s not quite hands-free, but using AudioPen can be less disruptive than physically writing. There are well-known benefits to using pen and paper, but recording and transcribing a voice note is better than not making any notes at all. ...

I’ve been an enthusiastic user of AudioPen for a few years. This brilliant app records and accurately transcribes your voice notes in moments. You can either opt for a light tidy to add punctuation and remove your ums and ahs, or ask it to make you sound like Cicero. Although you can organise your notes in AudioPen using folders and tags, most of us nerdy types already have a preferred note-taking app. In my case, that’s Obsidian. If you don’t know Obsidian, it’s a powerful yet simple app that stores your notes and plain markdown files and gives you various ways to make connections between them. ...