How to take lecture notes with AI during class

When you write down what a lecturer just said, you stop listening to what they say next. Live Notes takes that job off your hands. You press record, and Bord builds structured notes on your board while you pay attention to the speaker. This guide covers what to sort out before the lecture, what happens during it, the twenty minutes afterwards that turn the AI's notes into yours, the limits by plan, and what to do when something goes wrong.

Before the lecture

• Ask permission. Many universities have a recording policy, and in some places a lecture is the lecturer's intellectual property. Most lecturers say yes when asked. Ask once at the start of term, and do not share recordings without permission.
• Sign in. Recording is an upload, so it needs an account. The Free plan includes it, and signing in is with Google. Guests can use the rest of the board but Live Notes is locked.
• Make a board for the course. One board per module, or one per week for a heavy course, keeps the notes findable. Name it before the lecture starts so you are not naming things while the lecturer is talking.
• Check the length against your plan. Free records one lecture a week, up to 90 minutes, which covers a standard lecture. Plus records every lecture, up to two hours each.
• Sit where the microphone can hear. A laptop on the desk picks up a lecturer with a microphone fine. In a large hall with no amplification, sit nearer the front.
• Put the slides on the board if you have them. Drop the lecture's PDF on the board beforehand as a source. The notes then tie to the slides, and a question mid-lecture can be answered from both.

During the lecture

1. Open Live Notes and press recordPick Live Notes from the mode menu and press record. Bord listens through your microphone. You will see the audio level move, which is your check that it is hearing the room.
2. ListenThis is the point. Watch the lecturer, follow the argument, and let the board fill in. Resist the urge to type what is being said; that is the job you handed over.
3. Type your questionsWhen you lose the thread, type the question onto the board: "why does the second term drop out?" Bord answers from what the lecturer just said, and the question stays on the board as a marker of where you got lost. That marker is useful afterwards.
4. Stop when it endsPress stop. The recording is saved to the board as a source, and the notes stay where they are. If the lecture overran your plan's limit, start a second recording; the notes continue on the same board.

If the Wi-Fi drops, the audio waits in your browser and is sent when the connection comes back. Keep the tab open until it catches up.

What appears on the board

Every minute or two, Bord adds to the board from what it has heard: a heading when the lecturer moves to a new point, notes under it, and a diagram when the lecturer describes something that has a shape, a process, a comparison, a graph. The notes are an outline, because that is the shape of a lecture, and they are the AI's compression, not yours; the section below is about fixing that.

Everything on the board stays editable. A heading the lecturer did not use, a note that caught the wrong emphasis, a diagram you would have drawn differently: move it, fix it, redraw it. The recording underneath does not change, so you can always go back to what was actually said.

After the lecture: the twenty minutes that matter

Notes do two jobs: they make you think while you take them, and they are what you revise from later. An AI note-taker does the second job and skips the first, because the compression was its and not yours. This step is where you take that job back, and it works best the same day, before the forgetting curve has done its steepest work [1].

1. Read the board once, top to bottom. Cut anything that does not matter. A tangent, a repeated point, an admin notice.
2. Fix what the AI heard wrong. A misheard name, a formula with a sign flipped. Deciding whether a note is right is itself a recall exercise.
3. Write the one-line version of each section in your own words. A note beside each heading, in a sentence you would say. This is the compression step from handwriting, done once at the end instead of under time pressure.
4. Go back to your mid-lecture questions. Each one marks a place you got lost. Ask Tutor to explain that part from the recording, and it cites the timestamp, so you hear the lecturer's own version rather than a generic one.
5. Write one question per section in the margin. These are your cues for revision. Cover the notes and answer them next week.
6. Ask Quizbook for a short quiz on the lecture. Answer it before you close the board. Testing yourself once, soon after, is the single most useful thing you can do with new material [2].

If the lecture was about how things connect, pull the parts into a map on an empty patch of the board: the topic in the middle, branches to its parts, arrows between the ones that relate. The outline captured the lecture; the map is what you revise from.

Online lectures and recordings

Live Notes records whatever your microphone hears, so a laptop playing a video call works, and so does a recorded lecture played back from the university's system. For a recording you already have as a file, there is a shorter route: drop the audio or video file on the board as a source and Bord transcribes and indexes it, with every note cited to the moment.

Limits by plan

Every plan also shares one weekly allowance across building, pictures, voice and teaching, which resets on Monday. Current prices are on the pricing page.

When it goes wrong

• Nothing is appearing on the board. Check the audio level is moving. If it is not, the browser has not been given the microphone, or the wrong microphone is selected. If it is moving, wait: notes land every minute or two, not every sentence.
• The notes are missing a stretch of the lecture. Usually the connection dropped and the audio is catching up. Keep the tab open. If the lecturer moved away from the microphone, the recording has a quiet patch; Tutor can still try that stretch from the recording.
• The recording stopped early. You hit the plan's longest-recording limit. Start another; the notes continue on the same board.
• A name or term is wrong throughout. Fix it in the notes, and use Ask to find the other places it appears on the board. If the term is on the slides, having the slides on the board as a source beforehand prevents it.
• The lecturer objected. Stop, and delete the recording from the board. Removing a source deletes it and everything indexed from it.

Questions