On App store, Goodnotes is now for AI notes and documents. What does that mean for digital note-takers in 2025?
Privacy
Ask Goodnotes, (that’s the name of the generative AI in the app), is not available for all users. About 9 countries are not supported due to local restrictions. It uses Amazon Bedrock so your notes are subject to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Privacy Policy. The Goodnotes developers do not collect your conversation history unless you share it with them. That clarifies everything you might need to consider if you’re to use the AI.
For extra precaution, though, avoid using AI or apps with AI if you have sensitive information that you can’t afford to get into the public eye. Technology has been known to malfunction, and we’ll leave it at that.
Cost
Ask Goodnotes costs nothing extra if you have Goodnotes 6 (both one-time and subscription). You have monthly credits that reset each month. I wish these were accumulative, though. That way, we’d be able to use less or more depending on our usage history. Actually that would probably make more sense if we were paying for them.
Summarise notes
Notes are already summaries of information you get from textbooks, so unless you just want them as text, summarising handwritten notes is a waste of your AI credits. But with textbooks, well, you might never take a single note ever again. Provided you have enough credits, of course, which at the moment we do not. The app took an awfully long time to get ready for long documents. So you want to keep your PDFs short. I ended up cancelling and extracting a few pages, which in itself is too much work, taking more time than just reading the book yourself.
Even with just the three pages, it still took a while to get the pages ready. But it was much better. The only problem I have with summarising specific pages is that you have to remember what they are. It would be better if we could navigate our documents to visually select the pages we want to summarise. The waiting time for me was too long, perhaps because I was just waiting and not doing anything else. The AI failed to summarise the three pages, but didn’t explain why. Maybe we’ll get lucky with one page.
That also failed, so, this is one document you can’t use Ask Goodnotes on. An explanation why the AI failed would help us understand the limitations of our AI tool. Before writing it off as useless, we thought to give it another try with a less intense document. And finally, some progress!
The reference links are great but I still can’t see how that is useful for learning, especially. I’d still read and write my own notes for better understanding. But, perhaps for teachers, the summaries could help them work faster. Quizzes are probably better, let’s try those!
Quizzes
You can only create a maximum of 10 questions for your quizzes. That is very little especially for a long document. So it’s better to do single pages. Once you start the process, you’re stuck with it and you have to go through the quiz. There is no way to edit it. Ask Goodnotes checks your answers in real time, and it’s great because you have your notes on the side. It’s easy to check the accuracy of the AI, and even help you with the quiz when you’re struggling with it.
Quizzes for students, or anyone trying to learn something new, are great. They are the most practical way to learn without having to create your own quizzes. Creating more quizzes for the same document generates a lot of the same questions. There’s a lot of repetition, which doesn’t help much. It’s better to just create a quiz for a single page if you have technical subjects.
Diagrams
Ask Goodnotes can generate flowcharts, timelines, and mind maps from your notes. That is another useful AI feature that we hope the developers can keep working on. At the moment, you only get an image that you can’t edit, and we hope that improves soon.
