The fatal flaw in these concepts was never the hoarding and capturing of data. This is what Apple is getting at with its Journal idea: to take the boatloads of data the phone is already collecting and offering it up to you for reflection and capturing for posterity.īoth the “second brain” concept and the “lifelog” concept have been knocked around for many years, each embraced by its own minority of dedicated enthusiasts. As our digital devices, especially phones and smartwatches, capture everything about us - nowadays down to our heart-rate - the trouble is accessing that data in an actionable way. AI turbocharges this idea by giving us a conversational interface for all that stuff, turning the repository of data into a partner to converse with, interrogate, and explore.Ī lifelog (I’ve written about it before) is a longtime techno-visionary dream of capturing all the details of one's work and life digitally for total instant recall, personal growth and posterity. As with the Mother of All personal productivity solutions, David Allen's Getting Things Done, externally capturing important thoughts, action items, ideas and concepts in a trusted repository to be systematically acted upon later is a brilliant way to overcome some of our human cognitive flaws. Note-taking apps that use generative AI function as a cross between a “second brain” and a “lifelog.”Ī second brain is “an external, centralized, digital repository for the things you learn and the resources from which they come.” This idea is not just about storage, but about improving your ability to think. Mainstreaming the second brain and lifelog ideas AI can compare your own thoughts and information, compare them with all the information in its dataset, and return to you the difference - the ideas you may be missing. But it can help you think and perform better by using AI as a partner, or a sounding board. Let me explain.Įvery person, by virtue of being a human being, has cognitive biases, blind spots, imperfect memory and limited mental capacity. The most profitable way to think about AI in general and AI note-taking and journaling in particular is that… AI completes you. AI note-taking and journaling could become where that partnership happens for most people in the workforce. It’s become something of a cliché to say that the future of AI is a human-AI partnership, rather than AI replacing humans. But when both Apple and Google commit to something, we can assume it’s going mainstream and will probably be used by a majority of the smartphone-using public very soon. How AI note-taking changes our livesĪI note-taking tools abound. Intriguingly, Apple promised something called the “Suggestions API,” which will enable third-party apps to participate. Once your data is imported, you can use NotebookLM like it’s ChatGPT, chatting with it and requesting information, summaries, analyses, lists, conclusions or whatever else you’re looking for. Then, the app encourages you to import up to five sources of information from your Google Docs (no doubt with other data locations supported in future versions) that can be 10,000 words long each. To use N otebookLM, you create a project, which might be a category of knowledge - say, trends in solar energy over the past decade. NotebookLM’s key feature is that it does the summarization for you, essentially handing you the key points from more complex and wordy sets of information. Summarization was a human task, and the mental process helped us engage with and remember the content. In the pre-AI era, we would go to meetings and summarize key points in our hand-written notes, which we could refer to later to remember what was said. Unriddle costs money, but you can try it free.) How Google's NotebookLM works Once your information is there, you can converse with it in a chatbot-like format. This online app lets you dump all kinds of information into a web app that feels like a cloud-based word processor. (If you can’t wait to get into the beta program, you can try something more or less in the ballpark - Unriddle.
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