How Mem Plans To Reinvent Note-Taking Apps With AI (theverge.com) 23
David Pierce writes via The Verge: In the summer of 2019, Kevin Moody and Dennis Xu started meeting with investors to pitch their new app. They had this big idea about reshaping the way users' personal information moves around the internet, coalescing all their data into a single tool in a way that could actually work for them. But they quickly ran into a problem: all of their mock-ups and descriptions made it seem like they were building a note-taking app. And even in those hazy early days of product development -- before they had a prototype, a design, even a name -- they were crystal clear that this would not be a note-taking app. Instead, the founders wanted to create something much bigger. It would encompass all of your notes but also your interests, your viewing history, your works-in-progress. "Imagine if you had a Google search bar but for all nonpublic information," Xu says. "For every piece of information that was uniquely relevant to you."
That's what Moody and Xu were actually trying to build. So they kept tweaking the approach until it made sense. At one point, their app was going to be called NSFW, a half-joke that stood for "Notes and Search for Work," and for a while, it was called Supernote. But after a few meetings and months, they eventually landed on the name "Mem." Like Memex, a long-imagined device that humans could use to store their entire memory. Or like, well, memory. Either way, it's not a note-taking app. It's more like a protocol for private information, a way to pipe in everything that matters to you -- your email, your calendar events, your airline confirmations, your meeting notes, that idea you had on the train this morning -- and then automatically organize and make sense of it all. More importantly, it's meant to use cutting-edge AI to give all that information back to you at exactly the right time and in exactly the right place. [...]
So far, Mem is mostly a note-taking app. It's blisteringly fast and deliberately sparse -- mostly just a timeline of every mem (the company's parlance for an individual note) you've ever created or viewed, with a few simple ways to categorize and organize them. It does tasks and tags, but a full-featured project manager or Second Brain system this is not. But if you look carefully, the app already contains a few signs of where Mem is headed: a tool called Writer that can actually generate information for you, based on both its knowledge of the public internet and your personal information; AI features that summarize tweet threads for you; a sidebar that automatically displays mems related to what you're working on. All this still barely scratches the surface of what Mem wants to do and will need to do to be more than a note-taking app...
That's what Moody and Xu were actually trying to build. So they kept tweaking the approach until it made sense. At one point, their app was going to be called NSFW, a half-joke that stood for "Notes and Search for Work," and for a while, it was called Supernote. But after a few meetings and months, they eventually landed on the name "Mem." Like Memex, a long-imagined device that humans could use to store their entire memory. Or like, well, memory. Either way, it's not a note-taking app. It's more like a protocol for private information, a way to pipe in everything that matters to you -- your email, your calendar events, your airline confirmations, your meeting notes, that idea you had on the train this morning -- and then automatically organize and make sense of it all. More importantly, it's meant to use cutting-edge AI to give all that information back to you at exactly the right time and in exactly the right place. [...]
So far, Mem is mostly a note-taking app. It's blisteringly fast and deliberately sparse -- mostly just a timeline of every mem (the company's parlance for an individual note) you've ever created or viewed, with a few simple ways to categorize and organize them. It does tasks and tags, but a full-featured project manager or Second Brain system this is not. But if you look carefully, the app already contains a few signs of where Mem is headed: a tool called Writer that can actually generate information for you, based on both its knowledge of the public internet and your personal information; AI features that summarize tweet threads for you; a sidebar that automatically displays mems related to what you're working on. All this still barely scratches the surface of what Mem wants to do and will need to do to be more than a note-taking app...
Wow. 3 paragraphs (Score:3)
But wait, it integrates a calendar.
And a sidebar. Omg. This sounds even better. And it can incorporate my web viewing history? That makes so much sense!
And I can somehow record my thoughts while on a train? Let me get my checkbook.
And it'll incorporate AI? A thousand crypto bros just spontaneously orgasmed.
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Does it have a calculator? No app is complete until it contains a calculator. I wish I was kidding- when I was writing soft keyboards once I was asked if I could make it print the result to the screen if you typed an equation and hit =.
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The basic concept of using AI to organize a notebook isn't a bad one. I use Joplin for notes, and it has tags and a search engine, but it would be nice if there was an AI agent that added tags and made fuzzy search possible.
It would also be good if AI could do a lot of the mechanical work of creating the notes and laying them out. Say I'm researching something, I'd dump a load of web pages and text snippets into it and the AI would spit out a report that summarizes it. All the web pages and text snippets wo
"AI" is the new "blockchain" (Score:2)
"AI' seems to be the new buzz phrase that scam artists like throwing into descriptions to make the gullible think their silly little idea, which has already been iterated a thousand times before, is actually something dramatically new and different and worth throwing lots of VC money at.
It's a note taking app! With AI! And Blackjack and Hookers!
I use a timeline based tool (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, it's freaking awesome, I recommend it highly. You don't mem or nsfw or whatever they change the name to.
(ASCII text file edited with any text editor on any OS stored on a Veracrypt volume)
Re: I use a timeline based tool (Score:1)
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Create a new . txt file and at the very top of the first line, insert: . LOG.
Now, whenever you open the file in Notepad.exe, Notepad will automatically insert a timestamp on the next line.
Enough, surely?
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I use Joplin for that. I organize notes by creation date and tags, as well as a few "notebook" collections.
It has a few advantages over an ASCII file. You can store images and PDFs in it, and use Markdown to format text. It supports things like mathematical notation. You can clip web pages into it too, which I often do just in case the site goes down or gets modified.
Joplin also allows for cloud sync of data (using your own cloud instance, or they have a paid one if you want) and encrypts all the data befor
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I agree on the value (of Joplin) being able to store more varied file formats, types of data, etc. Definitely a plus on the features side of the ledger. I used to use something similar, which was great to grab snips off the web, then write commentary, analysis, and press a button and get a website and an editable Wor
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Could you name your supposedly freaking awesome tool? Perhaps some of us might like to check it out.
He did, in the parenthesis.
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I'm using notepad.exe (Score:2)
I think it was bundled with Windows 3.1
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And it's "blisteringly fast".
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All my private, personal data (Score:2)
In the hands of some new startup company that has not earned my trust. Nope!
What problem does this solve? (Score:2)
When I want to remember something later (take notes), I send myself an email. Or if it's at work, I send the email to those who were on the call. Then later, if I want to recall what I recorded, I just search my email. My email is automatically organized by date and has handy subject lines to quickly tell what is in the notes.
Now, what exactly does this new Mem thing solve for, that's new? Oh, it "pushes" reminders to me at "just the right time"? No thanks. I've got enough of those push reminders that I hav
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I have a way to push reminders at just the right time. It's my calendar app. Why would I want an AI to guess when I can set the alert in like 3-4 clicks?
And people keep posting Capitalism is dying out (Score:1)