is jottie an ai product?

is jottie an "ai" product?

technically, yes. but i'm always hesitant to use the term.

the ai label problem

ai has become meaningless as a marketing term. every app with a text field now calls itself "ai-powered." most of the time it just means they're making api calls to openai in the background.

there's nothing wrong with that, but it's worth being specific about what "ai" actually means in context.

what jottie actually does

jottie uses machine learning for two main things:

1. semantic embeddings - turning your notes into vectors so you can search by meaning instead of just keywords

2. entity extraction - automatically identifying people, places, dates, and topics in your notes

that's it. no chatbot pretending to be your friend. no generated content. no decisions made on your behalf.

it's a tool that helps you organize your thoughts.

the implementation matters

here's what i think makes jottie different: all of this processing happens on your device.

for the ios app, jottie uses native machine learning functionality provided directly by apple. nlembedding for semantic search. natural language framework for entity extraction. apple foundation models for categorization.

this means you get all the auto-tagging and semantic search features without even needing to be connected to the internet.

notes will never leave the apple ecosystem unless you opt into cloud sync.

ai as infrastructure, not product

i think the best ai features are the ones you don't notice. they just make the product work better.

when you search for "meeting about the product launch" and find a note titled "q3 planning call with marketing team," you don't think "wow, what great ai." you think "oh nice, i found what i was looking for."

that's the goal. ai as plumbing. invisible. useful. out of the way.

not trying to be your assistant

jottie isn't trying to be a second brain. it won't think for you or make connections you didn't ask for. no proactive suggestions, no notifications.

it's a notebook. a really good one that helps you find things later. but still just a notebook.

the ai part is there to solve a specific problem: i write a lot of notes and i'm bad at organizing them. i need a way to find things later without being disciplined about tagging and filing.

that's the whole value prop. not "ai-powered productivity" but "notes that organize themselves."

so is it an ai product?

yes, in the sense that it uses machine learning models to provide features that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

no, in the sense that the ai isn't the point. the point is helping you find your notes. the ai is just how we make that work.

i think that's an important distinction. too many products lead with "ai" as if that's the value. the value is what the product does for you. ai is just one way to get there.

jottie helps you organize notes without the work of organizing. that's the pitch. the fact that it uses embeddings and entity extraction to do that is an implementation detail.

an important one - especially for privacy - but still a detail.