The meeting lasted forty minutes, and you filled three pages with notes. When you look back, you find them full of fragmented keywords—you can't even piece together who said what.
This has been my most genuine note-taking experience over the past two years. It's not that I don't want to take notes—I just don't know how to do it efficiently. That was until I started using tidenote (tidenote), and realized that the pain point of note-taking isn't about the act of recording itself—it's about the organizing afterward.
What you really need is 'organizing', not just 'recording'
Whether it's a weekly meeting, a lecture, or reading a paper, most people follow this process: record on your phone, take a screenshot, or jot down a few notes, and then... nothing. Because the cost of organizing is too high. Go back and listen to the recording? One hour of audio takes an hour to review. Flip through your notes? You can't even recognize the abbreviations you wrote.
What tidenote solves is this problem of 'note and forget'. It doesn't require you to change your recording habits; instead, it helps you quickly structure the content you already have. Its core logic is actually very simple: you feed it a recording, a text record, or a few bullet points, and it directly outputs summaries, to-do items, and key information points. The entire process is so fast that you hardly have time to mentally prepare—the resistance of 'Oh no, I have to organize notes again' completely disappears.
Three scenarios, three real 'time savers'
I tried it in a few real scenarios, and the results were more practical than I expected.
The first is a cross-department weekly meeting. These meetings are the worst because everyone is talking, but the key points are scattered. Before, it took me at least half an hour to manually organize, and I often missed content from departments other than my own. Using tidenote, I converted the meeting recording to text and fed it in. It automatically categorized by dimensions like 'Decisions', 'To Be Discussed', and 'Risk Items', and output a structured meeting summary. You don't have to guess who is responsible for what—it directly lists it.
The second is remote course learning. I was catching up on a data structures online course. The teacher spoke fast, and slides flipped quickly. Before, I had to constantly pause, rewind, and take notes. Now I just record the class audio and feed it to tidenote. The generated summary includes key nodes of formula derivations and homework hints. It's especially suitable for those 'I thought I understood, but then got stuck on the exercises' situations—you don't need to replay the whole thing, just find the spot where you got stuck.
The third is literature reading. My advisor requires me to read two papers a week and submit reading notes. Before, it took two to three hours to read one paper, plus another hour for excerpting and summarizing. With tidenote, I just drop a few paragraphs I wrote while reading into it, and it directly organizes them into a Problem-Method-Conclusion format, with a logic chain clearer than what I could write myself.
It's not for everyone, but that's actually a good thing
I have to say, tidenote is not a 'Swiss Army knife'. If you only keep minimal to-do lists or rely entirely on your memory, you might not need it. But if you're like me—someone who wants to organize notes after recording them and reuse them afterwards—it hits right at your pain point.
There are also two practical things to accept: First, it works better with audio input; plain text input is usable but doesn't bring out its full advantage. Second, summaries, no matter how fast, are only aids for judgment; the key decisions still have to be made by you—you can't expect it to make decisions for you, but you can use it to prepare the background for those decisions.
Also, the value of an AI note-taking tool like tidenote isn't in 'being perfect', but in 'reducing hesitation'. You no longer agonize over 'should I record this section or not?', because you can always hand it over to be organized later. This reduction in psychological cost, I think, is even more important than the few minutes saved.
If you frequently attend meetings, have ongoing learning needs, or need to output structured content summaries, it's worth giving it a try. Don't approach it with a 'testing tool' mindset—just drop it into a real meeting or class and run it once. The results will speak for themselves.
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