An important topic of discussion in the PKM community is the effect of ChatGPT3 and its use in note-taking workflows. AI assistants are gradually taking over various aspects of our lives, so it’s no surprise they are used for taking notes. However, there is a strong disagreement over this new trend. Some people think note-taking is a personal experience and that using an AI assistant to do it for us defeats the purpose. They argue that note-taking’s benefits, such as storing personal insights, are lost when an AI does the job. Nonetheless, AI assistants are becoming more advanced daily and can enhance the note-taking experience. Therefore, it’s up to the individual preference whether to use AI assistance.

Though some may oppose incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) assistants into our note-taking applications, they will inevitably spread out into our knowledge management workflows, the idea being that convenience triumphs when AI assistants enable us to search for what we need, rather than have to sort through everything to find it. AI would provide a convenient and efficient way to access information from our notes. Natural language processing (NLP) would allow us to communicate with a virtual assistant, asking questions and receiving answers in a matter of seconds. This form of AI would be more advanced than our current workflows, allowing us to quickly and easily retrieve information from our notes without blindly searching.

Here are some ways where AI assistants will help us in note-taking

  1. Discover semantic relations between our notes
  2. Questions - We can ask questions as if we are talking to another person, and the AI assistant will dig deep into our notes and come up with answers.

For example -

For readwise users who have their highlights there. The ReadwiseReader AI Assistant, Ghost, has the potential to revolutionise the way people interact with their database. When invoked, Ghost, the current AI assistant, is limited to an article, meaning that users cannot ask questions of the entire database. However, allowing users to query their entire database with Ghost freely would be a massive upgrade, allowing users to access the information they need faster and more efficiently. This level of accessibility would be a true game-changer for anyone looking to get the most out of their saved highlights and notes in Readwise.

Several Note taking apps have already incorporated AI assistants into them.

Craft has the most elegant solution. The AI assistant can summarise, create outlines, give pros and cons, generate hashtags, generate keywords and do translations in all the major languages.

But what has piqued my interest in Mem.ai’s implementation of an AI assistant? In mem.ai, you can query your database and based on your content, it will come up with an answer. This is an amazing feature. My only problem is that my content is spread across local files, apps like craft, and email. I want an inbuilt chatGPT3-like interface by apple, which is chat-based. Apple is only known to come in if they have perfected the tech, so till then, I am hoping some third-party app developed comes up with such a nifty solution. If you know about one, please let me know at manoj@pkm.one.