12 Free AI Note-Taking Apps for 2024
Free Ai Note Taking Apps
6th Sep, 2024
AI note-taking apps can help you get more done using your existing notes and transforming them to be more helpful and powerful. Here are our expert picks of the free AI tools for note-taking for you to upgrade how you take notes daily.
The hype of AI note-taking apps is real.
Many millions of people are fleeing their traditional, basic note-taking app for a more complex, powerful AI tool that will allow them to do more. Whether inside meetings, summarizing transcriptions via audio, or even cleaning up notes using AI for you.
The power behind AI note-taking apps can help you do more and remove the administration associated with organizing notes, helping you get more done and producing more in everyday activities for you and your team.
What are AI note-taking apps?
AI note-taking apps use AI technologies like ChatGPT, Claude, or Google AI APIs to help parse notes in various ways, such as transcription, summaries, organization, and more.
An example of this working would be for a feature like transcription, which can be processed via the API and help you create cleaner, more valuable notes that remove poor grammar, punctuation, and unnecessary elements and summarize core information.
Why are AI note-taking apps helpful every day?
AI note-taking can be helpful each day as it might save you time doing small administrative activities like summarizing content for another person, understanding all aspects of a meeting, exporting notes into a report-like format, or even cleaning up a note, freeing it from grammar, mistakes, or structural issues.
Using these apps has become famous for those who want to save time by producing more notes and eliminating unnecessary administration from their day.
Tool | Pricing (approx) | Best Feature |
|---|---|---|
Free, $10 per month | Customizable templates | |
Free, $18 per month | Slack integration | |
Free, $8 per month | Ask AI functions | |
Free, $8 per month | Noise cancellation | |
Free, $8.33 per month | AI Chat with your notes | |
Free trial, $10 per month | Audio AI transcription | |
Free, $10 per month | AI Ask Q&A | |
Free, $10 per month | Conversation intelligence | |
Free, $14.99 per month | AI-powered search | |
Free, $7 per month | AI note clean-up | |
Free, $9.99 per year | Handwriting clean-up | |
Free, $10 per month | Chat with your notes |
These are third-party tools and recommendations. Many tools, like Microsoft Teams, have premium features that allow you to create transcriptions and meeting summaries if you want to bake these into your current Microsoft 365 subscription.
Granola AI
How can Granola help you take notes using AI?
Granola is an AI meeting tool you can install for macOS that transcribes your meetings, combines them with light notes you take on a notepad, and turns them into an "AI-enhanced" version with the meeting summary and your notes placed into context.
Granola also comes with a meeting-type creator, allowing you to create different types of meetings so that the AI-enhancing abilities can quickly understand the context of the meetings you have to produce better results and give you a form you like to use.
Post-meeting, you can search the meeting notes using prompts, so you could ask it something like "What questions did they have?" that can be used in a follow-up email communication that will allow you to establish any worries they had, perfect for anyone. Still, we can imagine that sales calls help look super on the ball.
The share feature lets you share meeting notes via Slack, Notion, and other tools. This is an excellent way to save notes into apps you like using rather than forcing you to use a tool like Granola. The app comes with 25 meeting notes for free, which is a decent offering for those who want to get used to how the product works.
Should I get Granola for my notes?
Granola is a good tool that doesn't force you to use it too much. It is an app that works in the background in meetings but allows you to use the Notepad feature to manage your notes. Then, it layers the AI over the top. It works with macOS, which doesn't rely too much on the browser and is helpful.
The benefit to Granola is that you don't need to use things like Google Meet or Teams; it works using your system audio on macOS, meaning you can transcribe what people are saying without connecting to apps or video tools.
Explore more helpful Mac email apps.
Supernormal
How can Supernormal help you take notes using AI?
Supernormal isn't typical for the everyday note-taker.
It wants to be an upgraded way to take notes in meetings and works with Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. It works with login via Google Workspace or Outlook, which means you can use it for work, and it comes with some decent features to capture meeting notes better using AI.
It comes with a tasks panel so you can see better what tasks have been brought up within the meeting and extract them into a new area to visualize what's next. Installing the Supernormal Chrome extension to help make it work with Google Meet isn't hard, so you can use it on the web without installing any Mac or Windows software your company might block.
One of the most significant points with Supernormal is that if you don't want notes shared with other team members to avoid overloading them, you have to upgrade to one of the premium options, which is a bit of a shame. But essentially, the app has no limits on how many meetings you can have and works with various tools.
Should I get Supernormal for my notes?
If you're looking for a better way to integrate meeting notes and agenda items as a team, this option works well with your upcoming meetings. This is handy for reducing the need to install another app, as it joins meetings with you so that other team members can see your recording for more transparent meetings.
It is also encrypted with TLS 1.2+ and at-rest encryption, which makes you feel a little more at rest. There's no limit to the number of meetings, but there are several minutes in your storage, meaning your older storage will begin to be wiped once you go beyond 1K.
Tactiq
How can Tactiq help you take notes using AI?
Tactiq is an AI meeting tool designed to handle your notes and provide live in-meeting transcriptions and summaries. It works with Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams and supports over 60 languages.
As a Chrome extension, Tactiq allows you to take notes during meetings and recall specific elements afterward. It also helps create meeting summaries and action lists for post-meeting tasks, such as writing Jira tickets or crafting email responses.
You can create custom AI questions for reusable actions, prompting post-meeting notes quickly, like writing a detailed follow-up email.
The app claims to have over 400,000 users and handles over 2 million meetings monthly. It is one of the better transcription tools, reasonably priced at $8 for 10 AI credits per month, which provides access to unlimited transcriptions and other functions. More powerful features are available in the team plan, offering greater accessibility.
The product generally excels in transcribing meetings, providing product updates, and creating custom AI actions, similar to how Supernormal creates quality meeting summaries.
Is Tactiq right for us?
Consider Tactiq if you take meeting notes and want to coordinate them in one location. Its post-meeting functionality and custom actions with artificial intelligence are especially impressive. That’s where Tactiq truly shines as a product.
Krisp
How can Krisp AI help you take notes using AI?
Krisp is an interesting AI-based assistant for meetings and calls, designed for individuals and small teams. It helps you better record meeting notes using their advanced technology for on-device noise cancellation, originally their core product.
Using artificial intelligence, this technology reduces various types of noise, such as background noise, barking dogs, or crying babies.
In addition to the powerful noise cancellation tool, Krisp offers AI meeting transcription and an AI note-taker, which can be used even outside of meetings but is most effective during them. The tool works from the top right-hand corner of your Mac menu bar or device, helping fine-tune the meeting experience. It functions similarly to Supernormal, another popular transcription tool, to create effective meeting note summaries.
Krisp also supports call center transcription, providing real-time on-device transcription and compatibility with UCAS and CCAS platforms. It offers accent localization, which is perfect for non-native English speakers.
This growing tool integrates with all major platforms and can be installed on Mac and Windows, allowing you to use the Krisp microphone and speaker as your primary device to improve calls and collect insights.
Should I get Krisp AI for my notes?
Krisp is priced at $8 monthly for unlimited noise cancellation and transcription. The free plan is also impressive, offering up to 60 minutes daily of AI noise cancellation and unlimited transcription, which is not available in the pricing plans of Supernormal or Tactiq.
Mem
How can Mem help you take notes using AI?
Mem is one of the OG AI note-taking apps, and it was ahead of the other when the ChatGPT release came out in 2022, but it lost its advantage.
According to their website, Mem wants to regain this advantage by becoming a powerful AI tool for entrepreneurs to use for their notes. Mem isn't restricted to meeting notes or focuses on transcription. It allows you to take notes like note-taking apps out there right now, but it comes with AI organization, AI-related notes, and some other AI features that work more in the background to take and manage your notes better.
It wants you to take your notes fast and use a desktop app to allow you to take notes. It also has a robust AI chat that will process your notes and allow you to have a conversation with notes; this produces a better way to review what has been said and produced as part of your account.
For example, it is perfect for journal items for reflection. It also has ways to organize notes in the background without your need to do any productivity admin using AI suggestions. Mem is expecting significant updates for their AI note-taking in late 2024.
Should I get Mem for my notes?
Mem will be more traditional as a note-taking app and will handle your notes from an organizational perspective, helping you take the weight out of managing them.
So, in the longer term, Mem will be more suitable and might devise effective ways to take meeting notes. But for now, it upgrades what you might currently use as your note-taking app with AI powers.
Reflect
How can Reflect help you take notes using AI?
Reflect Notes is a popular note-taking tool that incorporates artificial intelligence and offers some impressive features. Known as a popular PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) application, users can coordinate their notes using end-to-end encryption, ensuring note protection. It also supports linking notes through graph backlinking, providing a more interconnected note-taking experience.
Reflect Notes features AI capabilities that enable audio dictation, turning voice notes into human-level accurate text. It can generate article outlines, list key takeaways, fix spelling and grammar, and save custom prompts. The AI is continually improving, and the application has grown significantly. Its primary focus on encryption is a crucial reason for its popularity.
Like Mem, Reflect Notes allows users to take notes and utilize AI features while connecting with calendar applications like Outlook and Google Calendar. Although not entirely free, it offers a 14-day free trial and a $10 per month annual plan, which includes all features, Kindle offline sync, and an iOS app. Reflect Notes is continually investing in AI, so we can expect more features to be added in the future.
Notion
How can Notion help you take notes using AI?
Notion is another interesting note-taking application and project management tool heavily investing in artificial intelligence.
Currently, a beta feature called Q&A allows you to search across all of your Notion content and ask questions. For example, you could ask, “What’s the web team working on this week?” it will return recommended pages, saving you from scrolling through your entire account to find answers.
Notion also includes generative AI functions to help improve your notes. These features use prompts to create better notes and autofill tables, which is particularly helpful if you use a database for notes. This functionality allows you to take advantage of your notes by filling in predetermined information. For instance, if you are making book notes or summaries, you could prefill the autofill properties in your table with an ISBN or the book's name, saving you time.
The AI add-on costs $8 per user per month, but you get free access, allowing you to get started and familiarize yourself with the artificial intelligence features.
Fireflies
How can Fireflies help you take notes using AI?
Fireflies is another meeting notes app that allows you to transcribe, summarize, and analyze voice conversations. It has a robust feature set and is used by 300,000 organizations for transcribing meeting notes. Fireflies enable you to automatically export all your meeting notes, action items, and transcripts per meeting. It also supports uploading audio to capture in-person meetings and transcribing phone calls using dialers.
This feature integrates with apps like SalesLoft, Outreach, Aircall, and more and is designed to capture these interactions instantly.
Fireflies also have an AI-powered search to scan through items after meetings and collaborate in apps like Slack, Notion, and Asana. A notable feature is the “Analyze Meeting” using Conversation Intelligence, which tracks speakers and provides insights into talk time, sentiment, and monologues. This feature helps measure performance and engagement, identifying if certain team members dominate the conversation and if others are not getting their ideas out.
Additionally, Fireflies integrates well with CRMs, allowing you to capture call notes, activities, and recordings and connect them to apps like Salesforce. It also features an app store with various abilities, such as generating quotes, defining words, or crafting emails and reports. Effectively, it functions like a bot to save you time during meetings.
Fireflies offer a comprehensive free plan with unlimited transcriptions and the ability to record with widespread applications. The paid plan, at $10 per month, provides unlimited AI summaries and 8,000 minutes of storage per month, which is fairly reasonable.
Evernote
How can Evernote help you take notes using AI?
Evernote has long been a note-taking application, but in the last year, it was acquired by a new company. Bending Spoons, which invested in Notion and purchased Evernote in 2023, is now trying to transform it into an AI-powered note-taking application. Leveraging their years of advancements in artificial intelligence, several changes have occurred behind the scenes.
Evernote now features abilities like AI Edit, which allows you to edit your notes, and AI-powered search, which scans all of your notes in the Evernote Professional Plan, enabling you to ask questions to find the perfect note. This renewed focus on AI has led to a resurgence in Evernote’s popularity, as people are returning to it for better note management in a familiar setting. While there are currently only two core AI features, Bending Spoons is a significant investor in artificial intelligence, so we can expect more advancements in the future.
Keep an eye on Evernote, the next hot AI note-taking app, as it evolves and introduces new AI capabilities.
Supernotes
How can Supernotes help you take notes using AI?
Supernotes is a free-to-use note-taking application with a limit of up to 100 cards, enough to get you started. While it doesn’t heavily focus on artificial intelligence, it does offer some neat AI features in the premium plan that enhance organizational capabilities.
One of the standout AI features in Supernotes is Vision. This feature takes your notes and transforms them into more structured formats, complete with emojis, relevant tags, and improvements to grammar and punctuation. This feature is handy for quickly refining notes you’ve previously jotted down, saving you time and effort.
Another valuable feature is AI Collections, which allows you to use prompts to find suitable notes across your account. It scans your account for relevant notes and groups them, effectively creating a folder for easy access and organization. This feature is perfect for quickly assembling related notes without manual sorting.
Supernotes is an interesting note-taking application that focuses on practical and valuable AI features rather than just incorporating generative AI for the sake of it. These features help enhance your note-taking experience by improving organization and note quality.
GoodNotes
How can GoodNotes help you take notes using AI?
Goodnotes is a popular iPad application, especially favored by university and college students for note-taking with the Apple Pencil and other tools. Over the past year, the app has evolved significantly, offering a reasonable annual plan at $9.99 and introducing powerful AI features such as Spell Check and Word Complete for correcting mistakes.
Goodnotes excels in handling handwriting on your device, whether you use a stylus or not. It can convert your handwriting and typos into the correct spelling, an impressive feature available on Windows, Android, iOS, and web platforms. This application is excellent for organizing and accessing all your ideas seamlessly.
The AI typing and handwriting features are currently limited to Apple devices. Still, they are highly beneficial for users who frequently create sketch notes and prefer a visual approach to note-taking. Goodnotes stands out for its ability to integrate various ideas and make them easily accessible, making it a valuable tool for visual thinkers and those who rely on handwritten notes.
Capacities
How can Capacities help you take notes using AI?
Finally, Capacities is a note-taking application that has garnered much attention in the last year. It utilizes object-based note-taking, allowing you to turn everything you do within the app into an object. For example, if you want to add a person, you create an object called Person and manage any people within your account. This approach can also be applied to books, tweets, places, ideas, quotes, etc.
Capacities are great for note-taking and journaling and include artificial intelligence features that enable you to ask questions about your notes and enhance collaboration with your objects. For instance, if you start taking notes on “The Four-Hour Workweek” within Capacities, you can use AI to ask questions and receive recommendations on improving your notes.
The AI features are rapidly evolving, making it impressive to see how they are integrated into the app. One reason Capacities could become a standout AI note-taking application is its object-based structure, which artificial intelligence can understand from the ground up. It excels at helping you ask questions and improve your writing, but the future potential of AI is exciting.
Additionally, you can connect your own OpenAI key for unlimited access to the newest AI models, saving money on their premium pricing. Capacities offer a unique and structured approach to note-taking, with promising AI capabilities worth watching as they develop.
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