u/EnlighteningHistory

I take a lot of daily notes, a mix of handwritten pages on an e-ink tablet synced to cloud storage and quick markdown scratchpads on my laptop.

My biggest workflow bottleneck right now is retrieving specific, actionable details across these scattered files:

• Keyword search fails when I can't remember the exact phrasing I used three weeks ago.
• Basic AI search tools miss proper nouns. Vector search is great for general concepts, but it routinely drops specific names, tech stacks, or deadlines (e.g., searching for tasks assigned to specific people) because embeddings prioritize overall context over exact words.
• Full-file context drops. Asking an LLM to process or translate a complete, multi-page meeting transcript often gets truncated due to chunk limits.

Before I start hacking together custom scripts or building a personal tool to fix this, I want to check if someone here has already solved this cleanly.

A few quick questions about your setups:

1. Hybrid search: has anyone found a tool or plugin that reliably combines exact full-text keyword search with semantic AI search?
2. Cloud permissions: for those syncing note folders to the cloud, how do you handle folder-level privacy without granting an app access to your entire cloud drive?
3. Weekly recaps: is anyone successfully automating weekly action-item digests out of daily scratchpads without manual copy-pasting?

Curious to hear how you manage this in your personal knowledge setups, or if most people are just sticking to strict manual tagging and native search.

Hey everyone! I'm seeking feedback here before I pour 100+h on this project. I love taking handwritten notes on my tablet, but I kept losing track of action items, proper nouns, and decisions buried across dozens of pages.

I’m currently building HalScribe, an AI assistant for note archives. Imagine it as a tool to chat with your notes. I'm testing an alpha version myself right now (which will be open soon), but because this is a side project for me, with limited time, I want to see if there's actual interest before I invest hundreds of hours building new features.

What HalScribe does differently:

• Synchronised with your note folder in the cloud: whatever is dropped into your note folder is potentially ingested.
• Strictly grounded (zero hallucinations): it answers solely using your actual notes and cites the exact files.
• Hybrid exact search: finds proper nouns, specific code snippets, and deadlines standard AI searches miss (e.g., "What task did Alex assign Dave for EOD tomorrow?").
• Full-note transformations: bypasses standard AI context limits to translate, rewrite, or analyze 100% of an entire note file from top to bottom.
• Automated weekly digests: scans scattered daily notes to generate a clean weekly recap of open tasks and key decisions.

Since I'm validating features right now, I’d love your quick feedback:

1. Cloud sync: I started with Google Drive, but Google forces apps to request read-only access to your entire Drive just to read one note folder. Would you prefer Dropbox or OneDrive instead, where permissions are isolated strictly to a private HalScribe note folder?
2. File formats: beyond .md and exported text, what file types do you need ingested? (.pdf, .note, audio to be transcribed, photos of handwritten pages, etc.)
3. Existing workflow: do you already use a tool to chat with your note directory, and what is it missing?