ATU787 – XNote with Brian Friedlander, Ph.D.

Hi, this is Brian Friedlander and I’m from AssistiveTek LLC, an AssistiveTek consultant, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 787 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on June 26th, 2026. Today’s show, we’re excited to welcome back Brian Friedlander. He’s here from AssistiveTek LLC to tell us all about XNote and how this new accommodation can assist with note-taking.

We’re also joined by our friends from Bridging Apps with an app worth mentioning. Don’t forget, listeners, we always love to hear from you. If you’ve got a question, a comment, or something you’d like to learn more about on the show, please drop us a line. You can give us a call at 317-721-7124 or send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. We look forward to hearing from you, and let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

If you happen to have questions about Assistive Technology, we have Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions or ATFAQ. The show is hosted by Brian Norton and features yours truly along with Belva Smith, as we all talk about assistive technology with questions that come in from email, phone calls, and other means. We also don’t always know the answer, so it’s very important that we have listeners that can help us out with some of those questions, because while we like to think every once in a while that we may know everything, we’re proven wrong almost daily on that one. So if you’re looking for more podcasts to listen to, or if you have questions about assistive technology, make sure to check out Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions wherever you get your podcasts. Listeners, next up on the show, we’re very excited to welcome back Ale Gonzalez from BridgingApps with an app worth mentioning.

This is Ale Gonzalez with BridgingApps, and this is an app worth mentioning. This week’s featured app is called Claude. Claude is an AI assistant app designed to help users with writing, brainstorming, organization, research, and everyday questions through natural conversation. Users can ask Claude to summarize information, draft emails, generate ideas, explain complex topics, create schedules, and assist with creative or professional task. The app also allows users to upload documents and images for additional support and analysis. Our favorite feature was the ability to simplify information in a clear and easily understandable way. Claude can help reduce barriers for users who may need support with organization, communication, or understanding detailed information. Its flexible AI tools can be useful for students, professionals, and individuals looking for assistance with productivity and daily task. The app is intuitive, easy to navigate, and encourages users to interact with technology in a supportive and accessible way.

Claude is currently available for both Android and iOS devices, and offers free access with optional paid features available. For more information on this app and others like it, visit www.bridgingapps.org.

Today, listeners, we’re excited to welcome back Brian Friedlander. And he’s back to the show to tell us about a great note-taking accommodation called XNotes. And I, for one, am looking forward to learning all about it. Brian, welcome back to the show.

It’s great to be here, Josh.

Yeah, it is great to have you back. Hey, for listeners who maybe haven’t heard you on here before, could you tell them a little bit about yourself?

Sure. So I’m Brian Friedlander and I’m an AssistiveTek consultant. Been in the field for probably over 35 years. I spent half my career as a school psychologist, and the other half as a professor of education where I taught courses in special ed, action research and assistive technology. And now that I’m no longer teaching at the university, I spend my time consulting to schools and parents around trying to help them secure assistive technology to support their family members or children with assistive technology.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, we’re very happy to have you back on and we’re happy to have you here to talk about XNotes today. So I guess to start us off with, what is XNotes?

So XNote is a really exciting, innovative product that allows a student or someone in the workplace to use a pen, but it’s a digital pen, so it actually has a camera on the base near the point. It does use traditional ink D1 refill, and a paper-based notebook. What’s special about the XNote solution is that the notebook has a micro dot watermark on the page so that the camera on the pen knows exactly what page it is in the notebook. And then using the XNote app, that’s where I like to say the magic sauce is. Your notes get automatically updated to the app, and then we also now, which is pretty exciting, can also process audio so students can not only take traditional handwritten notes, but also compare that with the audio and get a full transcript summary and insights into the notes that they’re taking. And we also include AI so we can transform those notes into, for example, we can translate the language even though maybe you wrote it in English, we can translate your handwritten notes into French, or Spanish, or any one of the languages that we have.

We can also summarize your notes. We can create flashcards, and we just recently added mind maps as well. So there’s a great way to look at the notes from different perspective, whether you just want a way to have it available to you on your phone with the ability to do full searches, tag your notes, as well as transcribe them and export them into, let’s say, Microsoft Word documents. So you can go right from your handwritten notes, send that to Microsoft Word, or copy it and paste it in Google Docs and then you’re ready to, if you want, type additional notes or modify them any way you want, you see fit.

Nice. Nice. That’s great. And Brian, you mentioned that I can get the audio as well as my handwritten notes, and then all that stuff just integrates together. I always think of it as I don’t have to worry about writing down everything. I can still take my notes so I’ve got my important points, but then I’ve got the other stuff to fall back on. Is that right?

Right. So your handwritten notes get compiled with the audio, and then the application can also discern speakers so that I can split speakers. And then what happens is that once the audio is transcribed, it gets broken up or timestamped so that as a student or someone in the workplace, you can click on the transcribed text, and then it will move basically the play head. And if you want to listen to the person in real time as what they were saying at that point in time, you can re-listen just to that portion. So it’s great because students never have enough time to listen to the whole lecture, but maybe there was a part that you did understand. They can go right to that part and just listen to that section, which is great.

In addition, the program now with the AI can also summarize the notes and give you insights into your notes with the audio, which I think is really fantastic. And not only that, if you are a student or in the workplace and you have executive function disorder, ADHD, the AI will go through your notes and pick out actionable items or tasks that you may need to follow up on. So for example, in your notes, or if it heard the audio, you record the audio and it said, “Remember to hand in the essay next week,” it will pull that out as a task, and then you can then connect it to… We do connect it to DOIs, but we also have, which is I didn’t really talk too much about it last week on your full day note-taking webinar.

We also have automations, we can create automations using certain triggers. So one of the automations I use in my notes is HW for homework. So if I write For HW, do page six in the history book, what it will do is it will automatically send me an email with the contents of my handwritten notes as a reminder. But I could create an automation that takes that information and puts it into a task like Google Tasks. So you can run different automations depending upon what you want to do, and we also integrate Zapier, which is a tool that lets you create your own automations as well. So it’s really a full-fledged toolkit. So you can use it out of the box with some of the basic automations, but you can create your own that may be more specific to a program that you want to connect it to.

I’ve been really impressed with the feature set in addition for college students or people at the workplace who are in Google meetings, or Team meetings or Zoom meetings, the program can look into your Google calendar and then automate the process and bring the XNote bot into the meeting, and then it will automatically record the meeting without you having to manually set it up. So it does have some really nice automations. And I have to say that the programmers are, they’re using agile programming techniques. So I had on their Discord server, and I had mentioned one about a week ago, I said, “Could you add mind mapping to the application?” And they said, “Yeah, we’ll do it.” And like a week later it was there. And when they did it, I said, “Now I can see the mind map and interact with it, but is there a way for us to save it?”

And then like two days later I had the ability to export that as a PDF, an SVG file, and the ability to save it as a markdown file, which then would allow me with the markdown file would allow me to export it and then bring it into like Mindview AT, or bring it into AOA, or more full-featured mind mapping application and continue to work on it. So they’re constantly adding features to it. I guess what’s exciting too is not only is available for iPhone and Android phones, but as you saw last week there’s the web app, and so you can just use it straight away when you’re on your computer in a meeting or the telephone, and use it. I think even for me, I’ve been using this digital pen technology for probably close to 20 years. And I will share with you, Josh, I am not the best with paper and notes. And typically before this technology, I’d be running five or six notebooks, or legal pads and never be able to find anything.

So my workflow now is to use like XNote, and I take all my notes in the notebook. And what’s great is the ability like when a teacher, a parent calls me up and I need to find something, I can find it instantaneously because I can search on my notes, I can tag them, and everything is in one place. And so that is really the beauty of the system too. Again, if you have executive functioning issues, everything is in one place and you can find it. You don’t have to scan it, everything is there for you an exact duplicate of what your handwriting was in your notebook. And then you can take that information and do what you want with it. Like I said, we have tremendous handwriting transcription, so it’s about 97, 98% accurate. So you can take that, export your handwritten notes into Microsoft Word, and start working on it and use it as you see fit. If you want to copy, paste it, move it, do what you want with it’s a great tool.

Again, the other thing too, I just wrote a post on LinkedIn. Some students might still prefer to maybe start an essay just by starting it handwritten, and then they can take it, transcribe it, move it, and then move it to Google Docs or Microsoft Word and it’s totally editable. Lots of different strategies and workflows that might meet the needs of students that have certain learning profiles.

Oh, definitely. Yeah. Because you mentioned so many things there, being able to find the information and let me know my tasks that I need to do. That always seems like sometimes the hardest thing. I’m thinking of it in a work setting, you get off the meeting and you remember the last four things you talked about, but it was like, what was step one? Or what was my task? I remember what Sally and Jimmy and Billy are all doing, what was I supposed to be doing? Or where do I start? Or those things. But then you brought up a great point. And Brian, I’m glad I’m not the only person in the world who has just copious amounts of notebooks and legal pads with just amazingly great useful notes that are never easy to find, and never there when you need them.

Never easy to find.

Yeah. Or they’re just, you’re at a meeting somewhere else, you’re like, “Oh yeah, I just talked to so and so about that. I wrote it all down in a book that the good Lord only knows where it is.”

This technology really reduces the cognitive load. And then for students that have trouble with working memory, these are great tools whether you stick to the handwriting or use the audio, it’s really a great tool. And with some of the AI that’s built in, students, if they were in a, let’s say a history lecture, after they’re done, they can take a quiz with the AI. So create flashcards. So lots of really interesting ways for them to interact and not be so passive with their notes, just reading them, they can actually interact with them, and they can continue to ask the AI questions as they’re working with their notes.

As an example, maybe you’re in art history class, you’re learning about Vincent Van Gogh, teacher mentioned something about Starry Night. You record it and then at the end of the day, you can go into XNote and say, “Tell me, what was the importance of Starry Night?” And then the AI will respond and give you information back about that.

So again, you can be more interactive with your notes, and you don’t have to necessarily feel… I think a lot of students feel the need to get every word down. And so with this technology, you don’t have to do that. One, if you’re just doing the handwriting, that’s one thing. And then you can always have the audio to fall back on as well.

Well, I love, and you brought up the fact of it being searchable. And not just searchable in the way of really having to even think to search, but just asking it questions, being able to find that information.

Yeah. I think sometimes students are a little too passive with their notes. It’s not enough to read them. You need to interact and involve yourself with them. I think some of the AI features certainly allow you to do that, whether you want to create a quiz based on your notes, or whether you want to create flashcards. I think those are some good ways to help students retain the information, especially when they’re taking tests or quizzes.

Oh yeah. Well, I can especially see it over the course. We’re talking about class by class or maybe meeting by meeting, but if I think about semester over semester.

One of the things that they did with the upgrade and the software is the ability to put your notes into folders. So you could take all your notes for, let’s say History I and put them together, and then you could then search them or compile information based on that. Because you can ask the AI any question, and so that the ability to not only organize by tags, but organize by folders is really a powerful feature set that was just introduced in the upgrade to the software.

Very, very cool. Yeah. And I love that it’s… If I go to the internet and I just ask whatever search engine, whatever AI kind of thing a question, it’s going to search the whole internet. I love how this is just searching those notes. So it’s the information of what the professor said, or my boss said, or the people in the meeting said. It’s not going and finding information that’s out there for everyone, but the stuff that’s important and native to what I’m studying, what I’m trying to do, and who I’m probably going to be presenting this information to.

Yeah. And the other thing too, it also has, for students that might be involved in STEM, it also can recognize mathematical formulas and equations, and the transcription will also transcribe it as well. And so again, if you’re in a math class and you wrote X+6=10, you weren’t quite sure how to solve it, the AI can solve that problem on the page. So it can be used in STEM as well.

Oh, heck yeah. It’s just an extra tool, another way to keep all that information. That’s awesome. Brian, you mentioned this a little bit, but it sounds like I can use XNotes along with maybe some of the other AT tools I use. Is that correct?

Yeah. And I think last week I shared that for students that maybe need some reading support, you can go from your handwritten notes and click the letter T for the transcription, and then read your notes out loud using text to speech, and you should be able also if you wanted to in that note field, which is editable, you can use the word prediction as well. I’m actually thinking of some other ways that we might be able to use some of the AT tools, how they can work together to give students different workflows for how to use the information.

So for example, maybe taking… And again, I was talking to the folks at Mindview about the possibility, for example, taking the transcript or the file from the text and running it through Mindview AT, and create maybe a more extensive mind map in there. Or taking the markdown mind map based in XNote, bringing it into Mindview, which then gives you a full-featured mind mapping application for students that might want to use that to chunk information, or to use it as a pre-writing tool for an essay. Because Mindview has the text to speech and speech to text as well.

So we’re thinking about some new workflows with some of these technologies.

That’s really cool because that takes it to that next step. Note-taking and information capture is so important to be able to have this information, but then being able to take it the next step and actually produce with it.

Yep, absolutely. Yeah.

Very, very cool. Brian, you probably have a lot of these, but I don’t know if you’ve got to work with very many students with XNote yet or anything, but do you have any stories you could share with us about someone’s experience? Or something else with XNote?

Well, being fully transparent, it’s a little early just yet, but I have worked with students that have used digital pen technologies. I worked with a student started out in middle school, in the eighth grade. And this was someone who was dysgraphic and you might say, “Well, how is someone who has Dysgraphia able to use it?” So I taught him how to use just keynotes or phrases and using, let’s say a Cornell note-taking method. And I recently worked with him in college and he told me, he said if it wasn’t for the digital pen technology with the audio recording, he never would have got through because he had issues with working memory and retention.

So it’s a great technology and as you said, Josh, it’s very discreet, it’s a notebook and a pen, and it’s that simple. And with these technologies too, if you want to use the audio recording feature, then yes, you would need to set that up ahead of time, turn your phone on, and just the pen connects by a Bluetooth to your phone and then you have the best of both worlds, both the ability to save, record your handwritten notes, and then you have the audio as well with the full transcription in the background.

But again, if you just need something where you want to think of it as almost scanning your notes without the audio, you can just walk in, make sure the pen is turned on. It usually is when you take the cap off, it turns on, you open your notebook, you take the notes. And then when you get back to your dorm or the library, you turn on your phone, the pen connects over Bluetooth and then all your handwriting gets downloaded to the application, and then you can do what you want with it.

Nice. And I like how you have the choice. So if I have maybe a class or a certain thing that I’m not supposed to record or a meeting or maybe that I can’t, I can still be able to have my notes in the form that I’m actually going to be able to use them. Or for some folks, that might be the accommodation they need. They’re like, “I don’t need a recording. I take great notes. I need them in a centralized location where I can access them from different places.”

Yeah. And then it gives you the ability again to, again, using a notebook, you can search, tag, and do all that good stuff. In addition, I think for students in STEM, this could be really helpful because then again, like I say, they’re in a math class or maybe a higher level math class, they don’t necessarily have to use the audio, but they’re writing mathematical expressions. And they can have the AI help them solve it if they need to do that. So there’s lots of different ways to think about how this technology can be helpful for students in lots of different types of classes.

Oh, most definitely. And yeah, then with lots of different kinds of needs or barriers, I can see how it could fit a lot of different ones.

Yep, absolutely.

Awesome. Well, Brian, if our listeners want to find out more about XNotes and check them all out, what’s a good way for them to do that?

It’d be great, they can actually contact me at Brian, B-R-I-A-N at Xnote, that’s the letter X-N-O-T-E.ai, glad to provide you with any information you might need. And actually I’m available to do 15 to 20 minute demo for those that are interested in seeing what you’re able to do.

Yeah. I definitely recommend it because we can talk about it here all the darn time, but to see it and it sounds like a lot and it’s not. Yeah. It is. It is a lot of things, but it’s not overwhelming or overbearing. You can use as little or as much as you want, and it’s pretty intuitive.

Yeah. And you could jump in, like you said, you can jump in to some of the features, and then as you use it and you feel more comfortable with it, you can take advantage of some of the more advanced features. But basically it’s a pen and a notebook, and that’s the really nice part about it. It is quick to set up and quick to use.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, Brian, thank you so much for coming on the show, for telling us about XNote, and we can’t wait to have you back on again sometime in the future.

Sounds good. A lot of exciting products coming down the pike.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, or shoot us a note on Twitter @indataproject. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or INTRAC. You can find out more about INTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nicole Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own, and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA project, Easterseals Crossroads are supporting partners or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update. I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana.

We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.