Streamlining Note-Taking

I tend to take notes in meetings with pen and paper, I feel quicker jotting things down, and then I like the review aspect of putting it into digital form (e.g. in jira or slack message).

For some time now, I have been using a hybrid approach with the Kindle Scribe. Similar to an iPad with a stylus, but without the distractions.

The Kindle also has an OCR function, but notebook synchronisation is still rather poor and lacklustre (you have to send yourself an email and download an attached txt).

This is my setup. Once I have my notes in Scribe, I open the Kindle desktop app and access the notebook. To OCR the page I use the Raycast extension called ScreenOCR, the result is saved to the clipboard. The output is often disappointing, I have a bad handwriting and to improve the formatting I rely on some LLM. This phase is also initiated by Raycast.

For content that I want to improve locally, I use the Ollama extension with the Mistral engine. It is also possible to configure a shortcut by passing a costom command. For non-sensitive data, I use a custom script that uses the openAI API with chatgtp-cli instead.

echo $(pbpaste) | OPENAI_OMIT_HISTORY=true OPENAI_API_KEY=****** chatgpt converts these handwritten meeting notes. The input is often in upper case letters in English or Italian. Make sure the output is clear and well formatted.

The more or less well-formatted text is then copied to Obsidian, where I do the finishing touches. It seems like a long and cumbersome operation, but I actually get along well ;)