Why I'm building a note taking app without AI

When I talk to people about what I'm building, I give 'em the pitch on Docket being a note taking system specifically designed for regular meetings.Very commonly the first thing they reply with is something along the lines of: ah, so, with AI right?No. Not with AI. No.What? But now I just have AI tools transcribe all my calls and take summaries. I haven't written notes in months.Good for you, but you're not who I'm building Docket for.I'm building Docket for people like me who want to actually use their own brain to distill important notes out of interactions in meetings and find a lot of value in doing so. Writing notes yourself as a driver for distilling what's important. For remembering what matters, in what can often be a lot of noise, filler, and formality. Taking (or not taking) actions with an inherent sense of their priority.I refer to this as active note taking. It's a shift in mindset from thinking about taking notes in meetings as 'recording', which is a chore that ought to be handed off or automated, to actually distilling the few concentrated points of actual interest out of an hour of talking. Not only is this something you do not want to hand off, it's something that you can uniquely do, that you want to do, and is in a large sense the apex of the value you create for your company as a professional and smart person.This only gets more true the more senior you get. You will notice this when you look around the room in a meeting with very experienced senior people in it. very often, they don't talk a lot, and when they do what they say is of immense value. What they've been doing is distilling, in their head, everything that's going on in this meeting, drawn out the one or two points of maximum value, and then shared those.Active note taking is about either being that person, and actually writing down those points so they are not lost in the ether, or being in the room and knowing when you hear them from that you should write them down.An AI can't really do that. It can take that note, for sure, but it can't separate it from the 50 other points that were made that aren't as important. But more importantly what it can't do is crystallise that point in your head. Once you're out of that room for a couple of hours, doing other things, try going back to the notes the AI took where those points are interlaced with others of varying value and remembering, out of that context, what the actual important things were.Active note taking is, in itself, a process for distilling and cystallising in your mind what is important at the point when you have maximum context. If you do it later, the value of the process drops off almost entirely.So that's entirely what Docket is built around, and is why, no, it is not an AI note taker. There's a lot of companies building tools that do that. You probably know people at work who are keen on using them. You probably also have a sense of the value those notes end up providing. And you know that's not what you want, or need, or indeed are going to do. You're a live player, a professional, using your skills and intelligence that AI will never replicate (being as it is, a midslop generator) in real time to provide unique value to your company. You're not a passive 'note taker' going through the motions in boring useless meetings. You're driving them.