The Best AI Tools for Taking Notes in 2025

Albus is a colorful note-taking app with a distinctive interface. It gives you an infinite canvas for generating sticky notes with text and images, all using ChatGPT AI prompts. When you need to brainstorm freely, it's a great resource.

Start by giving your board a name, and Albus automatically populates a box on the left side of the screen with suggested prompts. Clicking on a prompt adds a sticky note with a ChatGPT response to your board. A box labeled Ask Anything lets you write your prompt or question. From any sticky note, you can click a plus sign to get more prompts related to the info in that note. In the upper left corner is a setting that lets you choose your use case for the board: explore, study, or teach. You can search for images based on the prompt as well. You can also ask follow-up questions in each sticky note and edit them. Albus currently costs $9 monthly, though a free trial is available.

Mem is an AI note-taking tool that helps teams come up with more ideas and content related to a given topic. It does some of the typical stuff you expect of generative AI, like writing article drafts and helping you brainstorm ideas using prompts. But where it really shines is its suggestions. Suggestions work best after you add all your team members and documents (you can import text files and notes from Notion) to your account. When you create a note, Mem provides context in a sidebar, helping you add relevant information or connect to other existing documents. Write a team member’s name, and you get a suggestion to tag them. A Chat tab functions like a personalized ChatGPT-style interface where you can ask questions related to all the data that you have in your account storage.

Paid plans for individuals start at $14.99 per month and include 100GB of storage. You must contact the company for team pricing. A free trial is available.

Microsoft Copilot is now a major part of Windows 11. It appears in the Start menu and every Office app, including OneNote, where it's arguably most useful for research. You can use the ChatGPT-based Copilot to generate notes on any topic. Have it create travel itineraries and checklists or ask for productivity advice. If you don’t like OneNote, you can do the same things with Copilot in Microsoft Word. Or you can use Copilot via the Start menu and then add the responses to any app. Copilot's prominence in Windows makes it extremely accessible and helpful for figuring out how AI can be most useful for you.

The popular note-taking app Notion now has AI tools. Notion AI excels at answering questions about your existing data, generating text from a prompt you give it, and automating actions based on the text you select. To use the AI, either type "https://laurenancona.me/eks/zITbvNmLnFWbjBnL3d3d6MHc0/ai" or highlight any text in a note and look for the Ask AI option. With the second method, Notion provides dozens of suggestions for how the AI can help: brainstorm related ideas, draft a blog post, draft a social media post, summarize it, translate it, and so on. Notion can also find action items in your text, tell you the pros and cons of something, write a job description, and more. The combination of these abilities makes Notion a great place to generate new ideas or notes and leverage existing information.

Notion offers a free tier with limited features. Paid plans start at a reasonable $12 per person per month, though you still need to pay an extra $10 per person per month for unlimited access to AI features.

What if you could create your own AI model? Perhaps based on all your memories, notes from a class and textbooks you've read, or data from a big project? Personal AI can help you do just that. You start with an essentially blank AI model. As you feed it text or documents, it learns and grows within the bounds of the data that you provide. From there, it works like a personalized ChatGPT tool, meaning you can ask it questions based on the available data. This AI tool will even give you suggestions for that part.

The Personal AI plan for individuals costs $40 per month and supports up to 50,000 memories (data and information you upload). Enterprise users must contact the company for pricing. You can build your own LLM using Microsoft Visual Studio, though it's a more advanced project than signing up for Personal AI.

Reflect is a minimalist yet feature-rich note-taking app that stands out for its ChatGPT-4 integration and ability to create custom prompts in seconds. If you’re going to use ChatGPT to perform the same kind of actions on different texts as an editor or a team lead, the latter use case should really interest you.

You might already know that you can give specific instructions to ChatGPT every time you ask it to do something, such as "keep the answer short and make it sound professional." Reflect helps you build prompts with specific requests directly into a template. In effect, it helps you become a better AI prompt engineer and save your settings. So, when you use the “Summarize this” prompt on some text, the response will only ever be a short answer in a professional tone. Click the arrow button and choose the Clone option when a prompt is running to customize it. And if you’re nerdy enough, you can create whole new prompts from scratch. (Reflect has a nice demo to help you through the process). Overall, Reflect is similar to Notion and Obsidian in that it has a relatively barren interface and offers a calendar integration. It costs $10 per month (billed annually) and includes ChatGPT 4 access.