I’ve been using VoiceNotes for a few days. It’s an AI note taker you can use for meetings or as a memory companion. I’ve got it wired into my iPhone’s action button, and running on my desktop machine.

Things I’ve tried with it:

• Dictating problems I’m trying to solve and letting it summarize. Its voice recognition is better than what I get with Gemini Pro at work.
• Dropping quick reminders as a capture inbox.
• Recording vendor demos.
• Developing action plans/next steps on some routine business stuff.

I have mixed feelings about it.

It does a good job capturing dictation. It does a good job extracting todos, tasks, and next actions from a given note.

I imagine, over time, with a corpus larger than the four or five dozen notes I’ve created this week, the “Ask AI” feature, where you can query your collection for insights, would get more useful. As it is, it’s still in that state of any new corpus where there’s not a lot of insight to glean.

That means I’m more interested in what it can do in terms of structured output, and that is just okay. It has a bunch of canned formats it can apply to a given note, but no way to build one (you can do a one-off prompt with a given note, but I don’t think you can save it). And its “todo list” output, oddly, is an ordered list.

My other use case, besides pulling actions out of a note, is getting a rundown of the day’s notes and tasks. It can’t deal with any prompt along those lines: It summarizes the last note you took. If you specify the date you want a summary for, it picks notes from other days. It does have a way to get that summary from a set of notes, but that means opening up a picker and clicking each note you want in the summary. Fussy.

It also has an integration picture: Todoist, Notion, Zapier, webhooks, and Readwise. The Todoist integration (I tried it with a free account) is primitive, and creates more work. Webhooks and Zapier seem promising.

I heard someone recently say that with AI assistants, dudes want Jarvis.

I guess maybe I sort of do want Jarvis, just for what seems like a trivial use case: “Tell me what I told you today at a high level, and then with any specific tasks, etc. I need to capture.” VoiceNotes can do that, but not without some friction. And given the friction, why not just “Hey, Siri, remind me to do this thing I have to do?”

I really wish Apple would get its act together with Apple Intelligence: All the pieces are there, but the glue isn’t. You should be able to just capture voice memos with the native tool all day long and have a variety of outputs via Notes, Reminders, etc. As it is, you’re stuck recording things, then explicitly generating a transcript, then explicitly pasting it into a Note, then asking Apple Intelligence to do stuff it sometimes manages and sometimes mysteriously fails at.

This “empty your mental pockets into a little valet tray at the end of the day” thing is something I’ve wanted for a while. When I was first learning Ruby I wrote a thing called “panopticon” that just traveled things like Pinboard, Evernote, the Safari history sqlite db, NetNewsWire’s read/unread AppleScript API, my starred inbox, etc. and dumped out a report into Evernote that let me see what I’d captured or looked at on a given day. I’d like an assistant that did something like that.