By: CJ Most people don’t want to read a 30-page report just to find three important points. That’s one reason AI summarization tools have become so popular. They can take a long article, meeting transcript, research paper, or document and turn it into something much shorter. But creating a useful summary isn’t as simple as…

By: CJ When you ask an AI assistant a question about a document, a collection of notes, or some other personal information, it can sometimes feel like the AI is looking through your files the same way you would search through a folder. That’s not usually what’s happening. A large language model, or LLM, doesn’t…

By: CJ Imagine having thousands of notes saved on your computer. You remember writing something about an idea a few months ago, but you can’t remember exactly what words you used. You search for “climate change,” but the note actually says “global warming” and “changes in the environment.” A normal keyword search might miss it.…

By: CJ Human notes aren’t usually written for someone else to read. You might write half a sentence because you already know what you meant. You might use an abbreviation that only makes sense to you. Maybe there’s a random arrow pointing from one idea to another, or a reminder written in the corner of…

By: CJ You can write down everything a professor says and still forget most of it later. That’s because good note-taking isn’t really about creating the longest possible record of a lecture. What matters more is what you’re doing with the information while you’re taking the notes. You have to listen, decide what’s important, put…

By: CJ There is a strange problem that comes with having access to too much information: you can end up knowing that something is somewhere without having any idea where it actually is. A useful article gets saved. A meeting produces a few good ideas. Someone sends you a document that you know you’ll need…

By: CJ Most people don’t have a problem with writing things down. The harder part is remembering where they wrote something six months ago. A useful idea might be buried in an old lecture, a meeting transcript, a document, or a note on your phone. You may remember that you wrote it down, but not…

By: CJ Meetings can be useful, but keeping track of everything that happens during one isn’t always easy. Someone might be explaining a new idea while another person is asking a question, and suddenly you’re trying to write down a decision that was just made. By the time the meeting is over, you may have…

By: CJ Think about how much information is spoken every day that never gets written down. A professor explains an important idea during a lecture. Someone makes a useful point during a meeting. A journalist records an interview and later has to go through the entire recording to find one particular answer. Writing all of…

By: CJ University lectures can move fast. One minute you’re listening to your professor explain something, and the next you’re trying to copy down a definition while also figuring out what the previous slide was about. By the end of the lecture, you might have pages of notes but still feel like you missed half…