I’ve never been fond of taking notes, and I’m far from alone. The process of scribbling something down causes me to miss what was said immediately after. I also have awful handwriting, meaning I can rarely read my notes anyway. Recording interviews has long been a solution, but transcribing them is another step (with extra cost) that can leave you with thousands of words to sift through, much of it irrelevant.

AI notetakers provide an obvious and compelling solution. They make IRL note-taking easier and faster by putting the power of AI into (or at least adjacent to) a portable device that evokes the microcassette recorder of yesteryear. As with all things AI, the jury’s out on whether AI notetakers are actually useful or if bypassing the intellectual rigor of writing down what people say is going to make us even stupider. At the very least I’ve found them to be a convenient way to capture the main points of a conversation—and helpful at keeping a record of discussions and meetings I might otherwise have promptly forgotten.

AI notetakers were all over CES 2026 and have exploded in popularity over the course of the year. Today there are well over a dozen options available in all manner of form factors. And note-taking features are now trickling into other product categories, with limited audio summary features now available in the beta software for the Apple Watch and short “audio snapshots” part of the Nothing Ear (3a) earbuds , to name a few.

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