AI: The Rise of the Machines... Or Just a Lot of Overhyped Chatbots?

Quevy

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Do any of you guys use AI note taking tools? One of my friends recommended Obsidian. I would love to get some other recommendations, so I can better understand the tradeoffs between different feature sets. Muchas Gracias in advance.
 

ToeMissile

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Do any of you guys use AI note taking tools? One of my friends recommended Obsidian. I would love to get some other recommendations, so I can better understand the tradeoffs between different feature sets. Muchas Gracias in advance.
Obsidian isn't an AI first tool. It's open source ( i believe) and sort of a blank slate with whole ecosystem built around it. There are a few note taking focus apps, the names escape me though.

If you're mainly doing notes, I would just use whatever has the best integration w/ your current notes/personal organization tool/office suite. For transcribing/notetaking, I mainly have a bit of experience with Copilot as it was available through my previous job. It's been ~ year since having used it, but it was pretty solid at transcribing and summarizing Teams meetings w/ 8+ people.
 
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Quevy

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Obsidian isn't an AI first tool. It's open source ( i believe) and sort of a blank slate with whole ecosystem built around it. There are a few note taking focus apps, the names escape me though.

If you're mainly doing notes, I would just use whatever has the best integration w/ your current notes/personal organization tool/office suite. For transcribing/notetaking, I mainly have a bit of experience with Copilot as it was available through my previous job. It's been ~ year since having used it, but it was pretty solid at transcribing and summarizing Teams meetings w/ 8+ people.
Thank you sir. That makes sense with Obsidian. My friend kept talking about in relation to it's AI compatibility, that I confounded the two. Thank you for the Copilot recommendation. I think I can get it with my office 365 account or MSDN subscription. I have 3 primary use cases. 1) Manage all my home labing notes and scripts. 2) documenting and commenting and setting todos while programming at work and aggregating my thoughts to writing proposals, reviews, policies, etc. at work.
 

Control

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Thank you sir. That makes sense with Obsidian. My friend kept talking about in relation to it's AI compatibility, that I confounded the two. Thank you for the Copilot recommendation. I think I can get it with my office 365 account or MSDN subscription. I have 3 primary use cases. 1) Manage all my home labing notes and scripts. 2) documenting and commenting and setting todos while programming at work and aggregating my thoughts to writing proposals, reviews, policies, etc. at work.
I poked Obsidian a bit but never really got into using it. As Toe said, it's its own ecosystem with hundreds or thousands of plugins that can do pretty much anything. Complete overkill if you just have a straightforward task you want to accomplish, but it seems like it could be pretty great for life/project management or content management for writers/creatives. It kind of seems like wordpress for organization to me. It might be reasonable for your use cases if you want to have more control over your systems than whatever off-the-shelf things give you. It's free and can be run completely locally, which is nice. I know the people that love it, really love it.
 

Quevy

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I poked Obsidian a bit but never really got into using it. As Toe said, it's its own ecosystem with hundreds or thousands of plugins that can do pretty much anything. Complete overkill if you just have a straightforward task you want to accomplish, but it seems like it could be pretty great for life/project management or content management for writers/creatives. It kind of seems like wordpress for organization to me. It might be reasonable for your use cases if you want to have more control over your systems than whatever off-the-shelf things give you. It's free and can be run completely locally, which is nice. I know the people that love it, really love it.
Thanks. My buddy who recommended it got in during their early access phase and has a life time subscription. I kinda' wish I had joined when he told me about it. As I was looking through their publishing features, I started getting inspired. I have a ton of notes and scripts for my home lab including docker compose files and random useful proxmox commands sitting in random txt documents. It would be cool to publish a wiki for myself. I could also use it to teach my kids stuff. There are a lots of possibilities.
 

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I've been looking for a new notes app since Evernote got retarded. I messed around with Obsidian a bit but it seemed way too complicated. I tried Joplin for a while as well but it saved all the notes I transferred from Evernote as HTML which is dumb and they want money eventually too. I've kind of settled on Google Keep for now. It's free and it's easy to share notes with anyone with a Google account so I don't have to try to get family members to install an app and/or pay for it to share notes with them. It took me like 2 years to get my brother to actually use Evernote and the rest of the family is a lost cause. The only thing I don't like about Keep is that you can't attach pictures or diagrams in the body of the note. You can have them at the top, but if I'm at a class or a presentation I like to take notes and then put in photos of their PowerPoint slides embedded in the note which as far as I can tell you can't do on Keep. It is also kind of dumb about the order it displays notes in, but you can always find them with search.
 
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Control

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Thanks. My buddy who recommended it got in during their early access phase and has a life time subscription. I kinda' wish I had joined when he told me about it. As I was looking through their publishing features, I started getting inspired. I have a ton of notes and scripts for my home lab including docker compose files and random useful proxmox commands sitting in random txt documents. It would be cool to publish a wiki for myself. I could also use it to teach my kids stuff. There are a lots of possibilities.
You only need a subscription if you want them to host it for you. No problem to run it on you own machine locally or on your own server if you want online access.
 
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ToeMissile

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You only need a subscription if you want them to host it for you. No problem to run it on you own machine locally or on your own server if you want online access.
I use Notion a bit and like it better than Obsidian, a little more structure “out of the box” but still huge eco system. Don’t remember if you can self host, or you can hook up your own LLM account. Capacities is another app in the space
 
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Quevy

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I use Notion a bit and like it better than Obsidian, a little more structure “out of the box” but still huge eco system. Don’t remember if you can self host, or you can hook up your own LLM account. Capacities is another app in the space
Thank you sir. Will be looking into Notion