Note-taking apps haven’t changed much since Evernote became a household name.
Sure, there’s been some innovation. But for the average person, a notes app isn’t a “second brain,” but a tool for quickly jotting down what you want to remember.
AI is changing that.
In the months since Sam Altman and co. unleashed ChatGPT, AI has powered up practically every product category, including note-taking.
Is there an AI that takes notes for you?
Whether you need help managing your meeting notes, summarizing large chunks of text, or organizing information, an AI note-taking app can save you loads of time.
Read on to learn about the benefits of AI note-taking and the best AI note-taking apps on the market.
What is an AI note-taking app?
An AI note-taking app (sometimes referred to as an AI note-taker) is a tool that helps people automatically capture, organize, and transform their notes using advanced machine learning and natural language processing.
What are the benefits of using an AI note-taking tool?
AI note-taking apps automate many of the manual and time-consuming tasks usually associated with note-taking, such as:
Capturing: Some AI note-taking apps use speech-to-text algorithms to automatically record and transcribe spoken words, making them a popular meeting tool.
Organizing: Once captured, AI note-taking apps can use NLP to understand the context of written text, extract meaningful information (like action items), and categorize notes automatically (often using tags).
Surfacing: In some AI note-taking apps, conversational search allows users to find information by asking questions (e.g., “what were the main takeaways from my last meeting with Marc?”) instead of using traditional keywords.
Summarizing: AI-powered note-taking apps can highlight key points and generate summaries, making them particularly helpful for people with many meetings.
And that’s just the beginning—s with anything in AI, the possibilities are endless.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s get to our picks for the best AI note-taking apps.
5 Best AI Note-Taking Apps in 2023
1. Bloks
Bloks is like an AI-powered note-taking app, meeting assistant, and personal CRM all rolled into one.
What makes Bloks one of the best AI-powered note-taking tools?
First, Bloks automatically transcribes and summarizes meeting notes and uses AI to identify action items and meeting takeaways—no bots required.
Then, Bloks automatically organizes your notes, categorizing them with AI and gathering relevant information from your email, calendar, and contacts to give you more context.
Bloks can generate a list of action items from any meeting. And users can create to-do lists and use AI to assist them with completing tasks—whether it’s generating a plan for a particular project, brainstorming ideas based on a topic of discussion, or rewriting their notes to be grammatically correct, shorter, in another language, or a different tone of voice.
Users can also use Bloks’ personalized AI chatbot, Ask Bloks, to find notes and surface information faster using conversational search.
Bloks AI note-taker is free while in beta and works with Zoom, Google Meet, and any other video conferencing platform (including Microsoft Teams, Slack Huddles, and Webex).
Pricing: Free while in beta (paid features in the future)
Bloks Reviews: 5/5 on Product Hunt
Bloks is available on iOS, Mac, Android, Windows, and Google Chrome Extension
2. Notion
Notion’s founders originally dreamed of creating a product that “everyday people” could use “to make their own apps and tools without having to write code.”
That isn’t exactly what they created. But they did create a customizable workspace that operates like a blank canvas.
With Notion, users can build knowledge bases, organize their workflows, and do practically anything else they can imagine—as long as it works within the parameters of a document or database.
One of its use cases is note-taking. With Notion, users can create notes, build task lists, organize pages, and use AI to generate new content, fix spelling and grammar, edit voice and tone, and translate or shorten text.
But where Notion falters as an AI note-taking app is with meeting notes. The app doesn’t record and transcribe meetings or generate summaries without time-consuming workarounds. And their meeting notes template is so simple, you could make your own just as easily.
If you’re looking for an AI note-taking app, Notion’s capabilities are reliable enough if you plan to use your notes to write and edit long-form content.
But there are more efficient options for people who have a lot of meetings or want an app that automatically takes notes.
Pricing: Free for basic. Plus and Business for $10 and $18 per month. Notion AI costs an additional $8 per user a month.
Notion Reviews: 4.7 on G2, 4.1 on Forbes
Notion is available on iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows.
3. Reflect
Like many modern note-taking apps, Reflect lets you create daily notes, add tasks, and backlink your notes to see how topics and ideas interconnect with each other.
But Reflect also integrates with GPT-4 and Whisper (OpenAI’s automatic speech recognition system) to transcribe and summarize voice notes and meetings. (Users can also sync Reflect with Google Calendar and Outlook to keep track of their meeting notes.)
Reflect open sources their prompts and lets users customize them, so they can transform their notes as they see fit. Reflect also boasts a ChatGPT plugin, which allows users to send the responses generated from their conversations with ChatGPT directly to their notes.
One major downside: Reflect doesn’t have a Windows or Android app.
Pricing: Free for 14 days. Reflect costs $10 a month (billed annually) after that.
Reflect Reviews: 4.9 on Product Hunt
Reflect is available for Mac and iOS and supports Google Chrome and Safari extensions.
4. Taskade
Taskade promotes itself as a “second brain for you and your team” and promises it can automate 700+ tasks with AI.
You probably won’t. But it is a handy tool for managing your professional tasks, projects, notes, and docs in one place.
Taskade’s AI note-taking functionalities allow you to brainstorm ideas with an AI chatbot and draw from 500+ AI prompt templates to streamline your workflow.
Users can also summarize text, generate and prioritize tasks with AI, and have it adopt different personas to generate more specialized content.
Taskade does a lot of things and is available on practically every platform and device. But one major downside compared to other AI-powered note-taking apps on this list is that it doesn’t record and transcribe notes for you.
Pricing: Free to $10 per month for personal use and families; $23 to $119 (!) per month (billed annually) for businesses and organizations with 10 to 50 users.
Taskade Reviews: 4.7 on Capterra, 4.3 on Google Play
Taskade is available on iOS, Mac, Android, Windows, Linux, Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.
5. Fireflies.ai
Fireflies.ai isn’t technically an AI note-taking app. But it is an AI meeting assistant that takes notes for you.
The AI meeting note-taker creates real-time transcriptions from Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Skype calls (although you have to invite a bot to your meeting, which some people find awkward). Users can also upload meeting recordings or video files directly to the service.
Fireflies.ai can also create summaries highlighting key points, action items, questions, and decisions brought up during conversations. (Users can manually correct, format, highlight, and comment on transcripts using rich text formatting.)
Users can also log notes into Salesforce, Hubspot, Pipedrive, and Zapier through third-party integrations and use search to find meeting notes by word, phrase, or topic.
For the free plan, the amount of meetings it can transcribe is limited (800 minutes), and, unlike Bloks, their AI super summaries require a pro plan.
Pricing: Free for individuals. $10 for pro and $19 for business per month (billed annually).
Fireflies.ai Reviews: 4.5 on G2
Fireflies.ai is available on web.
Final Thoughts on AI Note-Taking Apps
Even if you’re not a regular note-taker, you could benefit from using an AI note-taking app.
The apps listed above can take notes for you, help organize your thoughts, and use the power of AI to do a whole lot more. And they’re only getting better.
See for yourself. Download Bloks and try our AI note-taker (free while in beta).