Your lectures, as notes you can actually study.

Notebot turns lecture slides, recordings and whiteboard photos into one dense, explained study note. Then it's where you read, search and drill them: on your Mac, in plain Markdown, with your own Gemini key. Free while it's in beta.

Download for Mac See how it works

Notebot 1.0.1 · macOS 12 or newer · Apple silicon · 375 MB · Free during the beta

Notebot's home screen: a greeting, course chips, recent notes as pastel cards, and this week's study time.

The home screen. Every number on it is read from your own notes.

The generator panel: a drop zone holding a PDF, a recording and a whiteboard photo, the course and title, and a Run button with the request estimate.

Drop the lecture. Get the note.

The slides are the backbone: every bullet, formula and figure. The recording, your whiteboard photos and even the notes you typed in class are woven in where they belong, not tacked on as a transcript.

The note explains instead of transcribing: what each symbol in a formula means, why one step follows the next, the example the slide skipped. Denser than the lecture, never longer than it needs to be.

  • PDF and PowerPoint slides
  • Recordings, transcribed on your Mac
  • Whiteboard photos and handwritten scans
  • About three Gemini requests a lecture
A chemistry note in the reader: a rendered half-life formula, a plotted figure and a warning callout.

Read it the way it was meant to be read.

Math renders properly. Callouts mark definitions, tips, pitfalls and the professor's emphasis. Figures sit where the slide put them, the outline follows you down the page, and one search box finds any line in any note.

  • Formulas set with KaTeX, offline
  • ⌘K search across every note · ⌘F inside one
  • Split screen, tabs and history
  • Light, dark and auto · PDF export
A drill deck: one exam question from a chemistry note with a Reveal answer button, 0 of 9 done.

Every worked example becomes a card.

Notebot reads the questions and worked examples out of your own notes and deals them as a shuffled deck per course. Reveal the answer when you're ready. Exam Lens folds a long note down to its callouts, takeaways and questions.

None of this costs a request, because the cards come from the note's own structure.

  • Quiz Me hides the answers until you ask
  • Exam Lens, ⌘L
  • Zero API calls
The library drawer open over the home screen: the vault's course folders and notes as a tree.

Your notes are files. Yours.

Everything lands as plain Markdown in a folder you choose. Put it in iCloud Drive and the notes are on your phone too. Any Markdown app opens the same files. Rename, move and trash notes from the app; the vault graph shows how they connect.

There is no account and nothing to export. If Notebot vanished tomorrow, your notes wouldn't notice.

  • Plain Markdown files, readable anywhere
  • iCloud Drive if you want it
  • A vault graph of notes and concepts

And the rest of a good study desk.

  • Enhance

    Typed notes in class? Enhance merges them with the lecture files into a full note, in place, and what you wrote counts as what the professor stressed.

  • Home

    Where you left off: recent notes as cards in their course's colour, your courses, this week's study time, a drill row per course.

  • Study time

    Minutes with a note open, per course, per day, as an honest bar chart. It has no streaks, goals or nagging.

  • Editor

    Press ⌘E and the note is raw Markdown. Every save is atomic and backed up, and a lint stops edits that would break your drill cards.

  • Vault graph

    Notes and the concepts they mention, drawn as a map you can pan and zoom. Big vaults stay smooth.

  • Updates, inside

    Once a day Notebot checks for a new version. When there is one, a line appears: What's new, Update. It swaps itself and reopens.

  • Watch to learn this

    Under a note, a short row of YouTube videos that match its topic, for when you'd rather hear it explained once more.

  • Light, dark, auto

    The same desk at night: a charcoal sheet, the pastels deepened, bone-white ink. Or follow macOS.

Three steps, and the third one repeats.

  1. 1

    Install

    Open the download and drag Notebot into Applications. The first launch, macOS will say it can't verify the app, because it's made by one person, not the App Store. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, press Open Anyway, once.

  2. 2

    Set up, once

    Notebot asks four things: your name, a folder for your notes, your Gemini key (free from Google AI Studio; Notebot tests it live), and whether to download the 150 MB transcription model now. It runs on your Mac.

  3. 3

    Drop a lecture

    Press ✦, drop the slides and the recording, pick the course, press Run. A recording adds a few minutes. The note opens when it's done. Then read it, search it, drill it.

Private by construction. Free while it's in beta.

There is no Notebot server. There's your Mac, your folder, and Google's Gemini API under your own key.

Stays on your Mac

  • Recordings, which are transcribed locally and never uploaded.
  • Your notes, in the folder you chose.
  • Your Gemini key, in a file only your account can read.
  • What you read and when. There are no analytics and no account.

Goes to Google, when you press Run

  • The text and images of the slides you dropped, the transcript, and your photos go to the Gemini API, under your key, to write the note.
  • Nothing else goes anywhere, and nothing goes until you press Run. Reading and drilling never touch the network.

What it costs

  • Nothing for Notebot while it's in beta. It will have a price one day; you'll hear about it inside the app first, and your notes stay yours either way.
  • Google's free tier is about 250 requests a day; a lecture takes around three. Notebot shows the estimate before every run and counts what's left.

Notebot 1.0.1 for Mac beta

macOS 12 or newer · Apple silicon · 375 MB

Download for Mac

All releases and what's new · Windows is next.

Questions people ask before installing.

While it's in beta, yes. Notebot is being tested with a small group and costs nothing during that time; a paid version is planned, and you'll hear about it inside the app before anything changes. Generation uses Google's Gemini API under a key you create yourself; Google's free tier is about 250 requests a day, and a lecture takes around three. No card is needed for the key.

Lecture slides as PDF or PowerPoint (.pptx), recordings (audio files), photos of the whiteboard, scans of handwritten pages, and your own typed notes as .md or .txt. Any mix, for one lecture, in one run.

No. There's nothing to sign up for. The only account involved is your Google account, to create the Gemini key — and that key stays on your Mac.

Reading, searching, editing and drilling all work offline, because the notes are files on your Mac. Generating a note needs the internet to reach Gemini. Transcribing a recording is local either way.

Into the folder you pick during setup, as Courses/<course>/<note>.md, with images under Attachments/. It's an ordinary folder: back it up, put it in iCloud Drive, open the files in any editor.

Yes, as raw Markdown inside Notebot (⌘E), or in any other editor. Notebot never rewrites a note behind your back; saving is always explicit, and a daily backup is kept before the first edit.

Apple silicon Macs (M1 and later) on macOS 12 or newer. There is no Intel build right now. Windows is the next platform.

Because it's signed by its author, not notarised through Apple. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security and press Open Anyway once; after that it opens like any app, and updates arrive inside Notebot.