Next-level discovery

We read a lot and save a lot, but how do we make use of the content we consume? Here's how we plan to revolutionize the discovery of your notes.

Note-taking often aims to use the ideas, thoughts, and inspirations we once read about or thought about when we need them again. But most of the time, we forget about that; we don't find it anymore in a sea of files and folders, and we don't know where we stored it or how we named it. This leaves us feeling that there's no need to take notes.

Already today, Capacities helps us with this problem by organizing our content in a network. You link people with ideas and tag research papers with topics. Later, by traversing your network of notes, you can get inspired and use the notes you already have. While this works well, there's much more that we can do!

There are two high-level concepts we're thinking about to help you draft new ideas and discover insights from your notes.

First, we want to enrich your notes with related notes. We already have backlinks showing you all the links you made to this note. Below, we have mentions of that note that are not explicitly linked. If you wrote about a person already but didn't create it as a person back then, you'll now see all unlinked mentions on that person's page.

On top, Capacities will show semantically related notes below your backlinks. This means you can start working on a new idea, and Capacities will automatically suggest all of your notes that are related to your new draft. The same, of course, works for existing notes. As soon as more notes are available on the topic of a note, these notes will automatically be shown at the bottom. Browsing your notes will become even more exciting as new ideas or connections you did not think of can start to emerge. It might spark a new idea or help you look at something from a different perspective. We are really excited about this, and we think it will fundamentally change note-taking.

Second, we want to create an intuitive interface that lets you discover your content from scratch and lets you play with ideas in natural language. To make this more explicit: we want you to ask a question or describe an idea you don't have the right words for yet, and Capacities will return notes that might be helpful or will try to answer your question based on your notes.

That will make it easier to start with a new idea. You don't have to start from scratch every time anymore. You can start "thinking out loud", but now you get a response from your notes. You can use this to discover and tinker with your thoughts and turn them into explicit projects afterward.

We are working towards this idea, and we're super excited about making it real.