Introducing remio, AI-Powered Note Taker with Personal Knowledge Hub

After months of intensive research and development, our AI Note taker with knowledge assistant remio is set to officially launch in April, with an upcoming beta testing phase. Today, we proudly unveil our product website (https://www.remio.ai/) and invite you to join our waitlist for early access.

As the founder and chief designer, I want to move beyond functional descriptions (available on our website) and share our product philosophy through seven key insights about modern knowledge work.

1. When Mental Work Becomes Manual Labor

Our team of seasoned managers, PMs, designers, and engineers constantly face these frustrations:

- Critical resources buried in digital graveyards

- Meeting notes, research snippets, and data points scattered like puzzle pieces

- The certainty of having recorded an idea… somewhere

- Duplicate insights emerging in separate documents

If these scenarios feel familiar, you understand why we need better solutions. While methods like Tiago Forte’s CODE framework (Capture, Organize, Distill, Express) in Building a Second Brain prove effective, they turn creative work into mechanical labor. As an obsessive user of Evernote, Bear, Obsidian, and other tools, I’ve experienced firsthand how note-taking can become a cognitive overhead.

2. AI Summary and Q&A: Powerful Painkiller, Not a Panacea

Reviewing materials (in a broad sense, including watching videos, attending meetings, listening to podcasts, etc.) and taking notes are among the most energy-consuming tasks in knowledge work, and they don’t even count as direct productive output. The emergence of AI Q&A has led many to harbor unrealistic fantasies, imagining that simply handing over a database to AI will yield perfect answers to all questions, making reading and note-taking seem like relics of the past.

However, those who research this field know that the overall satisfaction rate with AI knowledge base Q&A is currently around 50%, and progress in improving this is slow. Even if AI Q&A one day reaches the point of answering any question flawlessly, it still wouldn’t be enough. Asking questions takes time, answering them takes time, and it’s often difficult to ask the right question on the first try.

This can be compared to the field of data analysis. The technology in this area is highly mature, allowing for very flexible queries to obtain answers at any time. Yet, even professional analysts create many readily accessible reports rather than querying data only when needed.

AI Q&A is indeed highly effective for meeting flexible needs, but a significant portion of daily work cannot rely solely on AI Q&A.

Many products now offer AI summarization (including outlines) and Q&A features to speed up reading, eliminating the need to go through the entire original text (or watch an entire video). AI summarization and Q&A do indeed multiply reading efficiency, especially when determining whether a resource is worth a deep dive or when only a preliminary understanding of a topic is needed.

However, upon closer observation, it becomes clear that using AI summarization and Q&A to process materials is still a relatively complex process. AI-generated summaries and outlines are often overly broad, and understanding a resource through Q&A usually requires multiple follow-up questions. The amount of information that needs to be read during this process still far exceeds the amount that ultimately needs to be recorded. Additionally, AI doesn’t handle the recording of information well during this process — it doesn’t know where to store this information, nor does it establish direct connections between new and existing knowledge. These scattered fragments of information still fall into the trap of being “saved and forgotten.”

We believe that AI summarization and Q&A are excellent “quick fixes” for specific scenarios, which is why our product provides robust support for these features. However, the idea that AI Q&A eliminates the need for note-taking or that AI summarization and Q&A replace the need for reading is unrealistic. They are not cure-alls; we need more and better solutions.

3. Knowledge Blending: Making Reading and Note-Taking Effortless, Letting Knowledge to Grow Naturally

Our solution is the Knowledge Blending feature — the first core capability that fully mimics users’ reading and note-taking habits, automatically organizing information into your personalized knowledge framework. Whether it’s industry updates, work materials, meeting recordings, academic papers, or video/podcast content, Blend operates just as you would:

Intelligent Filtering: Identifies the most valuable insights within lengthy materials.

Seamless Integration: Matches your knowledge structure to place new content in the optimal location.

Style Adaptation: Learns your note-taking preferences, from writing style to formatting habits.

By analyzing your past notes, remio deeply understands your knowledge framework and habits: it knows what interests you, where to store each piece of information, and how you’d record it — as if you were doing it yourself. Capturing ideas in your own words matters, but you don’t always need to do it manually.

With Knowledge Blending, skip sifting through endless raw materials. Instead, focus on digesting concise, curated insights generated by Remio. News, research reports, slides, lectures, meetings, or podcasts — let Blend handle the heavy lifting.

Need to trace a fact’s origin? Remio provides sentence-level citations for full transparency.

Even better, remio intelligently connects new information with your most relevant existing notes, sparking natural recall and enabling fresh insights through contextual comparisons.

Powered by Knowledge Blending, remio tirelessly links new data to multiple existing notes, reviving forgotten connections. For instance, Blend recently cataloged an article about Akool across three notes: “GenAI Applications,” “Zhejiang University Alumni,” and “Entrepreneurship References” — the last of which I’d completely forgotten I’d ever created!

With remio, knowledge doesn’t just accumulate — it evolves, interconnects, and surprises you with rediscovered wisdom.

4. Multi-Source Recall: Surfacing Relevant Insights Effortlessly

Search and Q&A helps you rediscover “known unknowns,” but we all face a deeper challenge: information we once saved, archived, or noted — then completely forgot existed. These “unknown unknowns” are the true bottleneck to knowledge growth.

While knowledge blending tackles this by intelligently linking old and new insights, remio offers a more comprehensive approach:

• Contextual recommendations: Relevant notes and materials surface in real-time as you read.

  
  

• Auto-surfaced snippets: Key excerpts mentioning your current topic appear at your fingertips.

  
  

• Smart grouping: Related notes are intelligently clustered for better organization.

  
  

• Writing assist: AI-powered suggestions deliver context-aware content as you type.

  
  

Every feature works proactively — no precise searches or queries needed. After all, how can you search for something you’ve forgotten exists? Though equipped with robust search capabilities, remio’s higher purpose is clear: to make valuable insights surface naturally, exactly when they matter most.

5. Auto Capture: Let AI Help You Remember All Documents You Encounter

Since the era of Evernote, Web Clippers have become almost standard for knowledge management software. However, none of today’s web clippers automatically save webpage content. This is because saving all webpage content may lead to significant quality issues, and traditional search functions alone cannot fully leverage the value of massive amounts of content.

But today, AI can effectively distinguish between text-based webpages worth saving (e.g., blogs, official articles, Medium posts) and webpages not worth saving (e.g., SaaS software functional pages, Twitter timelines, Medium list pages where most content is irrelevant to your interests). Additionally, features like smart Q&A, intelligent referencing, and AI-assisted writing allow more content to deliver value.

Thus, remio has created what might be the first browser extension that automatically saves all text-based webpages you visit — a feature loved by our team and early beta users.

remio may also be the first browser extension capable of fully preserving Google Docs content. While products like Evernote and Notion also offer Web Clippers, our tests show none can properly save Google Docs content.

Beyond webpages and online documents, remio can also automatically ingest local files like Word, PPT, and PDFs in real time (users can specify which directories to include). If managing these files through your file system feels cumbersome, simply store them in remio and leverage its far more flexible and powerful organizational capabilities.

6. From Saving to Deep Reading: Full-Spectrum Assistance

As mentioned earlier, AI summaries and Q&A are not panaceas. While remio isn’t a cure-all either, it provides rich capabilities to help you efficiently tackle any material or information.

First: Unified Management for All Content

Whether it’s online articles, documents, local files, notes, videos, meeting transcripts, or podcasts — remio enables centralized organization and one-click access, putting all information at your fingertips.

Second: Tailored Solutions for Every Priority Level

1. Critical Materials

• Require deep reading and reflection.

  
  

• remio intelligently recommends related content to spark insights.

  
  

• Offers annotation tools for highlighting key sections and adding comments.

  
  

• Features a split-screen layout with dedicated reading and note-taking zones.

  
  

2. Semi-Important Materials

• Only selective absorption is needed.

  
  

• Let AI handle the work: knowledge blending reads and summarizes for you.

  
  

3. General Materials

• Use AI summaries and Q&A to grasp key themes.

  
  

• Save results as notes instantly with one click.

  
  

4. Future Reference Materials

• Store them effortlessly with Auto Capture (zero manual effort).

  
  

• Smart recommendations enable quick categorization.

  
  

• Retrieve later via collections, search, or Q&A.

  
  

7. Local-First: Optimal Privacy Protection and User Experience

Over the past decade, SaaS has become the golden standard, with more products storing data in the cloud and forcing users to access via browsers or thinly disguised “desktop apps” (essentially browser shells). This shift has raised concerns about data privacy and degraded user experiences. Many users have complained about Notion’s sluggish performance, and even those using online docs for personal note-taking (with separate work/personal accounts) find responsiveness lacking.

remio adopts a local-first architecture:

• All data and indexes are stored locally on your device (phone/computer).

  
  

• Syncing across devices uses cloud services, but only when needed.

  
  

• Everything runs locally, except AI Q&A (which relies on large models).

This approach ensures:

✅ Unmatched privacy: Your data never leaves your control.

✅ Blazing speed: Instant actions, no lag.

✅ Seamless offline use: Works flawlessly on flights, trains, or other low-connectivity environments (unlike tools that charge for offline access).

No more manual uploads:

• Place files in designated folders → they’re automatically integrated into your knowledge base.

  
  

The future of local AI:

While we’ve developed solutions to run large models locally, today’s smaller locally-runnable models remain limited. Based on AI advancements, locally-run models should become viable by next year.

We believe AI knowledge tools, like programmers’ IDEs (which remain predominantly desktop-based), will thrive best with a local-first foundation — prioritizing both productivity and sovereignty over your data.

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If we continue, there’s much more to share — like our approach to folders, tags, and bidirectional linking in knowledge management. But true understanding comes from firsthand experience.

Interested?

👉 Visit remio’s official website (https://www.remio.ai/) and join the waitlist. We’ll prioritize your access to the beta and eagerly welcome your feedback.

Great products are co-created. Let’s build the future of knowledge management together.