Machine Learning and Automation Ideas for Note-taking

Let’s consider machine learning first, and then automation. For each we brainstorm the potential value for note-taking.

The Value of Machine Learning for Note-Taking

  • Automatic transcription of audio notes
    • Speaker identification during meetings or conversations
    • Resurfacing of action items, surfacing relevant information, and performing actions (e.g running a google search or sending a message) in response to audio cues during meetings or conversations
  • Automatic categorization of notes
  • Automatic categorization of spaced repetition flash cards
  • Automatic context-filling of spaced repetition flash cards
    • e.g. highlight a phrase to create a flash card; the necessary context is pulled in from surrounding paragraphs to make a coherent standalone flash card.
  • Automatic connections and graph construction:
    • Textual elements:
      • Entity extraction from notes (“implicit nodes”, e.g. “Bank of America”)
      • Attribute extraction from notes (e.g. “incredible presentation by Pierre-Antoine” gets tagged as incredible or wow (the canonical form).)
      • Relationship extraction (e.g. “Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson” -> creates an “author of” relationship)
    • Background knowledge elements:
      • e.g. knowing that Diamond Age is a book
  • Writing prompt generator / Writing assistant
  • Overlap detection between people’s graphs
    • The Go Note Go “clink” scenario
  • Autocomplete (e.g. gmail tab completion)
  • Improved spaced repetition algorithms
  • Mistake detection / fact checking
  • Summarization of notes
  • Highlight extraction from notes
  • Suggesting new ideas
  • Suggesting new online resources to read / explore
    • Incl. articles, papers, YouTube videos, Suggesting people to reach out to (e.g. because of their blog or Twitter or other things they’re written)
  • Semantic search
  • Conversational chat bots for exploring the knowledge in a notebase

The Value of Automation for Note-Taking

  • Share notes with people via their preferred messaging platform
  • Snooze notes and ideas so you review them later
  • Set pomodoros, alarms, and reminders to stay focused and stay on task
  • Note-taking via highlights (e.g. with Browserflow)
  • Note-taking via screenshots (e.g. from YouTube)
  • Automatic creation of spaced repetition from highlights
  • Bulk refactors of note-taking
  • Pulling in context from other sources (e.g. Warmly pulls LinkedIn info into Calendar, notes could pull info from wikipedia)
  • Sync notes between other sources and your notebase
    • Other people’s notes
    • Your email client, calendar, TODO app, spaced repetition app, GitHub issues, other messaging services, etc
  • Publishing of notes to a webpage (either publicly or privately), or to social media
  • New data entry mechanisms: Go Note Go, terminal, email, text, browsing history, location history, terminal history, IoT devices, etc
  • Spaced repetition for studying
  • Inactivity reminders (e.g. “it’s been three months since you’ve done a music activity”, or “it’s been over 6 months since you’ve spoken with David Dohan”, or “it’s been over a year since you’ve written about microbiology.")

Discussion 💬

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