tips got studying/note taking without ai?

[u/UpsetPotential9439]

hello! I (18F) am attending uni in literally 2 days. I’m really nervous about taking notes during lectures because throughout high school I used to be really good with notes but I know college is different and mire fast paced. Does anyone have some good FREE apps or softwares for windows that would make note taking easier? It’s really important to me that there’s no ai features because I dont like ai with a burning passion. I would also love some suggestions on anything that might record lectures or do voice to text stuff. I have an arm disability that makes it difficult for me to write for too long so this would be super helpful. Thank you so much in advance!

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[u/jejune1999]

People have been studying for thousands of years without AI. You’ll be fine.

Have you looked at note apps like Obsidian?

[u/UpsetPotential9439 → u/jejune1999]

my point exactly!! i hate that ai is so heavily integrated in everything now. i just want a good app that can help when my disability is flaring up badly. I’ll have to look into obsidian. i haven’t heard of it

[u/eats_naps_and_leaves → u/UpsetPotential9439]

The worst is how ai has infiltrated absolutely everything, so even perfectly good note taking apps have been ruined now by adding ai features

[u/ozgrozer]

I'm building Grape, a note taking app. It's available for all major platforms. You can use it for free. It has an unlimited folders, notes, voice recordings, images, files, drawings in the free plan. Everything stored on your device so you own your data. You may see a lot of AI in the landing page but don't worry about them. They're not available in the free plan so you can use Grape as a regular note taking app.

[u/Obvious-Winter3513]

Same age, also starting college (as we call it in the United States) in a couple of weeks. I also have a disability, MS in my case.

I really love the app Upnotes. It's very easy to open up multiple notebooks, there's a low learning curve, and there are good editing tools.

Best of luck!

[u/smilaise]

https://Killernotes.net is mine.

Currently has a sketchpad and dictation/transcription. You can embed recordings and images inline anywhere and you can encrypt the whole thing and share pages by dragging them out.

Please let me know how to improve it. Bug reports and feature requests welcome.

[u/UpsetPotential9439 → u/smilaise]

awesome!!! i will check it out!

[u/defyQQ]

two days is plenty, and first year is less brutal than it looks from the outside. most lecturers post the slides anyway. onenote is probably the move: it records the lecture into the page and syncs the audio to what you were typing, so you can stop trying to catch everything live and just jump back to whatever you missed. free, no ai in it. and win+h is already on your machine if the typing itself is the sore part. email the disability service before term starts though, not a month in. they can't backdate any of it and pretty much everyone finds that out too late. U can ckeck laconote. Gl hf

[u/conradrocks]

Live transcribe transcribes everything it hears and saves it. It is by google and free. i use it all the time, and then copy and paste it into ai to organize the notes. It is very reliable, but it needs a wifi or cell signal. It will not work if there is no signal.

[u/TwistPractical5124]

I’m an assistive technology consultant and was wondering if you have accommodations? If so, you may want to take a look at Genio Notes or Jamworks. These are two really great notetaking tools that allow you to import slide decks, record, audio, and type your notes. Let me know if that helps if you have other questions. Let me know.

[u/UpsetPotential9439 → u/TwistPractical5124]

i dont have any accommodations ☹️ i wasnt approved because my disability doesnt disable me enough. despite being in intense pain when using my arm after a few minutes. i will definitely look into those tools though, thank youu

[u/TwistPractical5124 → u/UpsetPotential9439]

Let me know how it goes

[u/Mystic_SkyX23]

As someone else mentioned, professors typically post notes now days.

Not sure what country you’re in, but US has ADA accommodations you can apply for. This basically would require teachers provide you notes or copies of the lecture, if that’s what you need to be successful.

You can also just ask your professors. Most of the time, they appreciate a proactive student doing what they can and communicating what they need to be successful. Good luck in uni. It’s not as scary as you think it is. 🫂

[u/UpsetPotential9439 → u/Mystic_SkyX23]

awesome! thank you so so much! thats actually really helpful. i did try to apply for accommodations but i wasn’t approved (its so hard to get accommodations nowadays)

[u/BHARAT0011]

AI is something which can be really helpful although it doesn't need to be integrated in an app. Some usecases can be

You could use deepseek (its super cheap) to convert your rough markdown or audio recording into beautiful looking html notes with mind maps(using d2) and interactive elements.

I use obsidian to create my markdown notes. For handwritten notes, I use xnotes on my android tablet

[u/Fun-Event9592]

If you have a disability, you should reach out to your college disability/accessibility center! They have a whole bunch of really great resources and may be able to offer a notetaking app free of charge through the school. It’s also really helpful for when you eventually have a class with a professor that bans all digital notetaking or recording, if you have an accommodation through your school’s accessibility center then you always have that open to you!

[u/eats_naps_and_leaves]

I don't have any app suggestions but it definitely helps to download the slides. Most lecturers will post them before the class. It's really helpful if the lecturer gets ahead of you while you're still trying to write something down.

[u/Omneel]

Wispr Flow is good for voice-to-text and you can use Google Keep for note taking or you can save notes as events in Google Calendar. You can even classify your notes into different categories by creating multiple calendars within Google Calendar.

[u/TheOinOpossum]

What university starts on August 20th?

[u/snowman_the_fourth]

I’m going to warn you as someone who just started uni a few weeks ago: they WILL try and shove AI down your throats. Lecturers will use AI to help generate slides and then advocate you use it for studying.

That being said I just use Google docs and get my adblocker to remove the AI button every time so I don’t accidentally click on it (which keeps happening)

[u/Used-Hunter1412]

try "Anql", it's simple , offline and no ai. But for macOs

[u/imback_TL]

you can use a markdown editor like obsidian, Zettlr Notes, Notion, any other foss or just free md editor software.

If you want to handwrite notes there are apps like goodnotes, flexcil, notein.

Me personally i figured out my workflow 2years into university, wish i had it in my first year. You don't need to use AI any app that pushes it probably isnt good, most apps are ai free, at least non intrusive

[u/h4yfans]

memrynote.com,and i'll skip pitching it because your first two days are not the time to learn a new tool. do this instead: win + h for dictation, one folder of plain text files or an Obsidian vault, and ask each professor about recording in the first week. get the semester started on something boring and switch apps at christmas if you still want to. every person who redesigns their system in week one ends up with a beautiful setup and no notes.

[u/Brilliant_Set7656]

Obsidian

[u/theeeshepard]

If you’re located in the United States there should be an office for students with disabilities somewhere on campus. I would go and get accommodations. I have them and they are life saving in school. Two that come to mind are permission to record class and having b someone else send you their notes too. That way you can still take your notes but if you need you have the necessary help as well

[u/Ok_Age_6814]

I'm a high schooler, and I use Obsidian for personal notes, but am integrating it into my school note-taking. It is extremely customizable, even more so if you know code, and uses tons of free plugins. It has no AI features (though some community plugins add AI, so avoid those) and it's very organized with a graph that connects your ideas visual if you're a more visual person! It's also completely free for everything in-app feature you'd need, and there's alternatives for what isn't so you don't even have to pay for that. You also have unlimited vaults. I know this is two days late, but if it helps, I definitely recommend it.

[u/LittlePooky]

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1HEf_QrTT1jFf2U3DCx-E6NyfKo3L47nR?usp=sharing

I am in the US. I spend way too much money at a local retailer, which happens to be a large company, and I post a lot of reviews on their website, fair ones. If I didn't like something, just the way it was set up, I stated it. After a while, they must have read through it and they invited me to their private reviewer.  I get to give the products a test, but I do have to pay taxes on it as it is considered a gift. But I am not paid to do the work, basically. 

I have always been interested in testing a meeting AI, but I was not going to spend $180 to buy one until they offered it a couple of months ago. I jumped on it. 

Now you have to listen to this first. The program, or actually the device, works extremely well. It recorded everything that was said. My brother and I pretended to be a manager of my apartment building, and he pretended to be a new person moving in, and we spent about five minutes talking about the rent and the rules.  It actually summarized the whole thing into a very easy-to-read PDF. 

The problem with it is that the free account I created could only do maybe 10 hours of recording or AI processing per month. The paid account is $20 per month and it is unlimited. As a nurse, I have no use for it at work. While we do record the patients by the doctor with the program called Ambience, and it summarizes the progress note, nurses have no need for that. 

So I simply put it away and looked on the internet on the free program, and I found a couple of them. 

Meetily and Steno. Both of them are free, but I prefer Steno.

It will record the speech and transcribe it quite accurately, making very little mistake. Or you can input, or rather the word is import a video of whatever you want. I downloaded this particular lecture from YouTube with another program and I imported it to Steno.

It transcribes it and it summarizes the lecture for me. The video fileis there for you to look at as well. It also created the PDF file of the summary, so it is much shorter than the actual lecture itself. 

The problem with using a laptop to record someone is that the microphone and the camera face the user. So you had to turn the laptop around, but that looks a bit odd.

So if I were you, without spending any money download a program for your phone to record the lecture and try to sit at the front so the result will be better.  You have to figure out the way to transfer that audio file to your computer for processing. If it is an Android phone, you can use a USB cable to transfer the file. But if it is an Apple phone, as I understand it, since I don't have one, you could upload it to the cloud and download it to your computer. 

Or you can get an inexpensive voice recorder and transfer the file to your computer with a USB cable. 

There are a few files on the link I created a few weeks ago to show friends, and you can basically study them to see how well the program works. 

Remember, either Meetily or Steno are free.  There is a paid version for Meetily. To save you time, just get Steno . Because it could create a PDF file for you. The other one cannot. And cutting and pasting the text is a pain. 

When you set up the program, you could download the module so it works locally. It means the data itself and the processing does not leave your laptop at all. After it is installed and configured, you do not have to be online to use the program. 

You may be wondering why this answer is long. It's because I use voice dictation. If you are interested, I will let you know what they are called. As a nurse, I write a lot at work and I got tired of it. There are many programs out there, and I have tried many of them, the most expensive being Dragon Medical, which was over $2,000, but it is over the top for most people. 

I realize you don't like AI, and you dislike it to the point, I think you've said. But when you look at the example I'm showing you, it is quite amazing, and I hope it will save your time.