The Unwritten World At Your Fingertips
Use AI note-takers to take notes, document to-dos, and connect dots. But don't forget to think for yourself too.
The Teardown
Tuesday :: January 7th, 2024 :: Approx. 4 min read
👋 Hi, this is Chris with another issue of The Teardown. In every issue, I cover how we interact with technology that powers our day-to-day lives.
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The Illegible World
I have a problem. Many, in fact. One relevant thing here: my writing is sometimes illegible.
I look back at notes and don’t know whether I wrote the letters or a small animal with claws danced on top of my notebook. The page (or more) of notes is a less useful capture of knowledge because I can’t read what I wrote.
Technology solves the neatness problem, but I’ve never loved the long-standard solution: electronic notes.
I’m referring to notes that are typed, not those captured on iPads or Remarkable tablets as electronic handwriting. Handwriting on a screen does not improve the quality of my letter construction in any meaningful way. Do you write like a drunk farm animal too?
Typing seems like the perfect solution. Typed letters aren’t messy or hard to read, assuming you’re not a savant that types and later translates wingdings. What you capture remains digestible long after its genesis.
But this sort of note-taking, just like hand-writing, requires that you do two things at once: listen for something to write, and then write that thing.
What if you miss something else while writing the note? You’re so focused that you don’t hear (in full or at all) what was said once you started doodling. And the opposite may happen too. You don’t write something that you heard and later can’t recall the brilliance.
What if you said you would do something but you forget what that was? Or what if you write that you’ll do something but you’re wrong?
Previously Unwritten World
Previous YC and current GroupThink founder Danielle Morrill described what now helps:
I’ve experimented with numerous AI note-takers over the last 8 months. There are many out there, some tied to corporate behemoths, and others like GroupThink scrappy start-ups.
My experience with these tools is positive - like Danielle. I like to use them for three specific assists:
Reviewing concise takeaways from phone calls. What did we all say about what we would do? What about the next steps? The note-takers capture those bits well.
Reviewing detailed notes supporting those conclusions. I said I would do X, so what details did we communicate about X.
Watching parts of my conversations to clarify intent and meaning. This bit isn’t an innovation from within the noteakers. Instead, centralizing video alongside the others helps reduce the need to flip between different apps. Also great: double-checking body language after everyone spends time on camera.
But what is the unwritten world?
On one hand, the conversation transcript is the unwritten universe. You see every spoken word transcribed on a virtual page. Sometimes the tools transcribe the wrong words, but the video allows you to review and correct them when you’re suspicious. Technology, like humans, isn’t always perfect.
AI-generated notes are the other collective unwritten bit. The tools summarize and synthesize conversation of any length or type.
I suspect that these notes - combined with transcripts, videos, and AI-to-dos - form a powerful knowledgeable base over time. Not unlike email. Find something you said 3 years ago? Sure, just a matter of searching your transcripts/notes/etc.
And that’s where I worry just a bit too. It’s easy to speculate that you might stop jotting physical notes altogether and instead rely on AI. What are the implications?
One outcome sticks in my brain: a decreasing ability to synthesize information.
You’re not practicing listening for and jotting only the most relevant moments from conversations. AI takes all the notes. You’re not connecting dots on the page to each other or to other adjacent blobs of knowledge you possess. AI connects all the dots for you.
Crazy I am just now reading this. I had literally never heard of this prior to the other night. My buddy and I do a podcast and he has an AI note taker (from his real job). I didn’t even know till after…and it was amazing!