Perfect AI Note-Taking App for the Effortless: What Features Should It Have?

Shuyi Wang
17 min readAug 27, 2024

We don’t need to understand the technical principles behind note-taking tools; we just want to enjoy the convenience and surprises that note-taking apps should provide.

Pain Points

For knowledge workers, inspiration can strike at any time, but fleeting inspiration is easily lost, which requires us to record it promptly.

In Luhmann’s note-taking system, there’s a specific type of note called a “fleeting note,” which emphasizes the importance of quick, timely recording as a key aspect of the card note-taking method.

However, for ordinary people, timely recording is not an easy task. Firstly, we may not always have pen and paper handy, and typing on a phone can be cumbersome; secondly, the fragmented content we jot down can easily be overlooked and lost.

The first problem is not hard to solve; after all, using voice input on a phone has become a common practice for many. However, the recorded content often suffers from voice recognition errors. Moreover, they lack contextual clues and can easily be discarded.

Some might say, what’s the big deal? Can’t we just organize it later?

That’s true, but how easy is “timely organization”? The moment you have an…

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Shuyi Wang

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