OmniNote

The Project

OmniNote is a hyper-memo application. It provides a note-taking platform that consolidates all the various uses of memos in one space. Rather than compartmentalizing your reminders, lists, saved web pages, ideas, and locations into separate applications, OmniNote helps to gather all of those items using one light input process and then utilizes AI to interpret the purpose of the memo. It is all about retaining a speed and convenience that rivals that of jotting down notes, while vastly improving their usefulness. One important source of inspiration was Apple Notes. Apple Notes is very instant and lightweight, and that is one of the reasons for its popularity. When creating OmniNote we wanted our app to have simplicity and speed, but at the same time it should offer the user much more than just writing something down and forgetting about it afterwards. This way, it would be an evolution of the concept of memos rather than its replacement. The project concept was also inspired by the current issue of fragmentation in digital memory. A thought is recorded in Notes, a task is recorded in Reminders, a location is saved in Maps, an internet link is stored in a new tab, and an idea gets recorded somewhere that you don’t access ever after. The aim here was to create something simpler yet more advanced than that. We wanted one space for memos that allows storing all kinds of data without thinking about structuring them upfront. This can only be achieved using artificial intelligence technology. While before the input had to be sorted by the user themselves, now OmniNote determines its purpose and generates structured output accordingly from various memo types. The thing about this project is that it doesn’t just rely on the AI to do any summaries for it. The role of AI here is intrinsic to the product itself. We’re trying to take messy reality and turn it into clean memo objects that will have their own behavior in the application. A location needs to be able to translate into something viewable on a map; a checklist must stay interactive; a reminder must be actionable. Getting the AI to feel real and not gimmicky was the hardest part. It would not be enough if the AI only produced good text. It needed to create the appropriate memo, keep the language used in the input, understand the structure, and provide good data for features like mapping and organization. Location detection was one of the most difficult aspects, as the AI should have been able to convert the locations to actual geographic coordinates, not just labels. OmniNote, in essence, is about reinventing the memo in an era of AI. The goal was to create something that would be just as natural as taking a note, but much more powerful once the content was captured. The dream scenario here is to create a memory system where writing something down is just the beginning, as the process can be enhanced by the help of artificial intelligence.

View this project on YouTube