OpenNote: Private, Local-First AI Study Tool for Your Documents

OpenNote is a privacy focused, open source answer to Google’s NotebookLM. Instead of binding education to one model and one prompt, it takes the opposite approach. It’s a terminal-based study companion that turns your own PDFs, documents, web pages, and notes into a private, searchable knowledge base that works with every major LLM provider available.

Study From What You Actually Have

Instead of chatting with a normal LLM and getting answers that drift beyond your material or are outright hallucinated, OpenNote reads your files directly. Drop in your PDFs, office documents, and saved web pages, and it organizes them into a local library it can search through. When you ask a question, it goes and finds the exact passages in your own material that answer it, then builds its response strictly from what it found there.

That last part matters. Every answer OpenNote gives you comes with a citation pointing back to the specific source it pulled from. If the answer isn’t in your documents, OpenNote says so instead of making something up. A study tool that admits what it doesn’t know is a lot more trustworthy than one that always sounds confident.

Your Documents Never Leave Your Computer

Because everything is processed and stored locally, your notes, textbooks, and research stay private by default. There’s no upload step, no cloud storage of your files, nothing sitting on a third-party server. You bring your own AI provider key, whether that’s OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or others and OpenNote uses it only to generate answers, never to store your documents.

More Than Just Answers

OpenNote doesn’t stop at Q&A. Once it understands your material, it can turn it into study artifacts you’d actually want to review before an exam: mind maps, study guides, FAQ sheets, topic briefings, timelines, and even narrated audio or short slideshow videos summarizing a topic. If your setup doesn’t support audio or video generation, it gracefully falls back to a clean written version instead of just failing.

Built to Work However You Want It To

OpenNote doesn’t lock you into one AI provider. It’s BYOK (bring your own key), with support for five-plus providers, so you pick what fits your budget and needs. There is an option that allows you to directly point any /v1/models at OpenNote, so if you prefer to keep things fully offline, you can run a local model on your device and point that at OpenNote instead. Even if you don’t have the hardware for that, you can spin up your own free Colab or Kaggle notebook and use it to power OpenNote. However you want to power it, that part’s entirely up to you.

Built for Studying, Not Just Chatting

OpenNote runs from a clean, distraction-free terminal interface, with dedicated modes for asking questions, searching your library, and generating study materials. It also keeps you in control of your context via a live meter that shows exactly how much of the model’s context window is filled, how many tokens you’ve used, and what it’s costing you, so you’re never guessing what’s actually being sent. It’s a tool built around one job: helping you actually learn from what you already have, privately and honestly.