Class notes

The deck is what the lecturer showed. The notes are what they said, and that is what ends up in the exam. That is why notes live inside the document, and Mina reads them when she explains that lecture.

Where you write them

On the document page, below the summary. A document holds as many notes as you need, one per class or one per topic, and each one opens to the side, in the right-hand column, or full screen.

You write them like in Notion: one line per block, and / lets you choose what each one is. There are headings and subheadings, bulleted or numbered lists, to-dos with their checkbox, toggles, quotes and dividers, and Tab indents a line one level deeper. What you paste from Notion keeps its formatting. A note saves itself as you type; if the connection drops first, whatever was missing is sent the next time you open it.

The padlock locks it: a locked note can be read but not edited, so notes you have already cleaned up do not get changed by accident. Right-click a note's card to move it to another class or delete it, and for a few seconds you can undo that.

You can leave a comment on a piece of text, or on a whole block, and reply right there, like in Notion. Comments are yours: Mina does not read them when she explains.

Before you have the slides

Class is now, and the slides show up tonight, or on Friday. That is what Take notes in class is for, on the home screen, below where you upload the deck: it opens a full-screen note to type your notes, dictate them or transcribe what is being said. You also get New class note when you right-click a folder. It is a loose note, not tied to any class yet: it waits in Opened recently and in its folder.

When the slides arrive, you attach them: from the note, with Attach to a class, you upload the file, drop it on the note or pick a class you already had; or you drag the loose note from the sidebar onto a document's notes. The note becomes part of the document with its images, and you never have to say which slide each line belongs to: they are matched on their own, like any other note.

Dictating it or pulling it from a photo

With Dictate, from an empty note or from the / menu, what you say lands on the line you are on. It is turned into text in the cloud, and the audio is not kept.

A photo of your notebook is uploaded from the note, or pasted into it. Either way, Filmina asks what to do with it:

• Extract the text. It is read in the cloud by text recognition that handles handwriting. The text sits in a block next to its photo so you can correct it while looking at it, and if you remove the photo the text goes with it.
• Paste the image. It stays as it is, one more image in the note. If you want its text later, you can still ask for it.

JPG, PNG, HEIC (what the iPhone takes), WebP and TIFF are accepted. Up to a hundred photos a day are read; past that, a photo still goes in, as an image. What counts for the explanation is the text: a transcription you have already corrected is worth more than the photo it came from.

Transcribing the class

With Transcribe the class, from a note, Mina listens through the microphone and turns what is said into text, live. It does not save the whole class for the end: every five to twelve seconds, waiting for a pause so a sentence is not cut in half, what it heard is sent, transcribed in the cloud and shows up. The audio is not kept anywhere; what stays is the text.

Before you start, the screen tests the microphone (whether it sounds good, too quiet or too noisy) and the connection, because there is no transcript without internet. You pick the microphone there, and it stays picked for next time. Then you can close the note or move to another screen: the transcript keeps going, and a pill at the bottom right takes you back to it.

The transcript belongs to the same note, but it is kept apart from what you type: your notes on one side and what is being said on the other. When you stop, Mina writes a summary of what was said, by topic, with whatever the lecturer left you to do: an assignment, a date, something to read.

What was transcribed counts for explaining just like what you typed: it is shared out among the slides by the words it has in common with them, and it reaches the explanation, the chat and the summary as long as the note has Use when explaining on. Transcribing and dictating use the transcription hours of your plan: one a month on Free and ten on Pro.

How they feed into the explanation

Every note on a document has a switch at the top, Use when explaining, on by default. When it is on, the note reaches the explanation, the chat and the summary. When it is off, it goes nowhere: that is for what is yours and not the lecture's, like a to-do list or something you have to hand in. In the list of notes, one that is off says "Not used when explaining".

Notes belong to the document, not to a slide, so each slide picks up the lines that share the lecture's less common words with it. What the note adds, Mina tells you; what only underlines something already on the slide gives that part more weight.

Changing a note changes the explanation of the slides those lines touch, and nothing else: the rest stay as they were. And the summary is not rebuilt from scratch over one note: it reads it and adds whatever it contributes.