Out-of-the-Box AI Second Brain

It can accurately extract relevant notes and enhance your writing flow without complicated setup.

Shuyi Wang
12 min readSep 3, 2024

Needs

As someone who values efficiency, I’ve always wanted knowledge processing and output to be simpler. Over the years, I’ve experimented with various note-taking tools like Evernote, Notion, Obsidian, Logseq, Roam Research, and Heptabase, all in pursuit of effortless note-taking, precise recall, and smooth output.

Before the advent of generative AI, these tools still required significant manual effort — even if you didn’t categorize your notes, you’d need to tag them or create manual links.

What I really want is the ability to record thoughts anytime without worrying about organization. When I need to access my knowledge, a simple natural language query should be enough for AI to search my notes, find relevant information, and provide a satisfactory summary.

This seems easy, but in practice, it’s not so smooth.

Since last year, I’ve introduced various AI-enhanced note-taking tools, including Notion/Craft AI, Quivr, Elephas, Obsidian Copilot, NotebookLM, and Claude Project, among others.

These tools vary in appearance, but they are all supported by a common technology, which…

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Shuyi Wang
Shuyi Wang

Written by Shuyi Wang

PhD in Information Science. Associate Professor at Tianjin Normal University. Former Adjunct Faculty at UNT. First Prize Winner of HackNTX 2018.