What is Goodnotes?
Goodnotes is a note taking app that captures, organizes, and summarizes notes and meetings for professionals, teams, and students. It supports handwriting, typing, sketching, and audio recording so input happens in whatever form makes sense in the moment. The note taking app syncs across iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and the web, meaning work stays current on every device. AI sits across the whole product and can transcribe meetings, search handwritten content, summarize recordings, convert handwriting to text, and generate quizzes or mind maps from existing notes. Teams can collaborate in real time across notebooks, documents, and whiteboards, and a template marketplace gives a ready-made starting point for common workflows.
Features & Benefits
- Live Meeting transcription: Record any meeting and watch spoken conversation convert to text in real time. Speaker identification runs automatically and produces a complete written record of every session.
- AI Meeting Summarizer: Turn long recordings and notes into concise summaries and key takeaways. This AI note taker capability pulls decisions and discussion highlights without requiring manual cleanup.
- Action Item Extraction: Identify concrete next steps directly from meeting transcripts. The tool lists who needs to do what so nothing slips through after the call ends.
- Searchable Audio: Search meeting recordings by keyword to jump to the exact moment in the audio or transcript. Find a specific quote or decision without scrubbing through recordings by hand.
- Calendar Syncing: Connect Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, or Apple Calendar to auto-create a meeting note with the event title, date, time, and attendees before the session starts.
- Handwriting Recognition: Write naturally on a tablet and let AI convert handwritten notes to clean, editable text. Built-in spell check and formatting support make the output ready to share.
- Handwritten Note Search: Search across handwritten notes, typed text, PDFs, images, and diagrams in this notes app. The AI indexes content across all input types so nothing gets buried.
- PDF Annotation: Mark up contracts, briefs, reports, and other PDFs by hand. Annotate, search, collaborate with teammates, and export when needed.
- AI Note Search: Ask questions across the entire note library and surface answers from handwritten notes, typed documents, PDFs, and sketches in seconds.
- Math Solver: Write equations by hand and let AI verify calculations instantly. Generate structured outputs directly from handwritten math.
- Quiz Maker: Generate quizzes and structured study outputs directly from existing notes.
- Mind Map Generator: Convert notes into visual diagrams that show how ideas connect.
- Whiteboard: Sketch, plan, and brainstorm on an infinite canvas. Add handwriting, images, shapes, and typed text in a shared freeform space.
- Quick Notes: Capture a fast idea or thought in one tap without opening a full notebook.
- Real-Time Collaboration: Share notebooks, whiteboards, and documents with teammates. Multiple people can edit and annotate at the same time.
- Cross-Device Sync: Start on a tablet, continue on a phone, and finish on a laptop. Notes stay current across all devices automatically.
- Security and Compliance: Encrypted storage, admin controls, and privacy-first design support teams handling sensitive material.
What can Goodnotes do?
- Transcribe meeting audio to text automatically
- Summarize meeting notes with AI
- Extract action items from meeting recordings
- Search handwritten notes by keyword
- Convert handwriting to typed text
- Annotate and mark up PDFs
- Record audio during meetings
- Generate a mind map from notes
- Create quizzes from study notes
- Solve handwritten math equations
- Sync notes across iPhone iPad Mac Windows and Android
- Collaborate on shared documents in real time
- Search across handwriting PDFs and images
Real-World Applications
Project teams working across offices may rely on this note taking app to handle client calls and internal standups from end to end. Meeting Assistant records audio, produces a transcript, and pulls action items so whoever ran the call can share a clear recap without spending an hour reformatting. Calendar syncing means the note is already set up before the meeting starts, with attendees and event details pre-filled.
Field professionals in construction, engineering, or legal work often carry tablets on site or into court. Goodnotes functions as an AI note taker in those settings, capturing site meetings or depositions as audio and converting discussion into a structured summary. The handwriting search lets them pull up specific annotations from the field by keyword, cutting the time it takes to produce formal documentation.
Students and educators can take handwritten notes during lectures and use the AI summarizer to produce concise takeaways afterward. This notes app generates practice quizzes directly from study material and checks handwritten math calculations without switching to a separate tool. Handwriting converts to typed text for submissions or sharing.
Marketing, events, and government teams that run frequent brainstorming sessions or public meetings may use Goodnotes as their go-to notes app for documenting discussions and generating structured summaries ready for review. Notes, sketches, diagrams, and typed documents stay linked inside shared workspaces, so teams pick up where they left off without hunting through separate files.
