💡 Why NoteWise?

YouTube has become one of the richest learning platforms on the planet — university lectures, conference talks, technical deep-dives, language lessons, and entire courses are all freely available. But video is a passive medium. You watch, you nod, and two days later the details are gone.

NoteWise was built to fix that gap.

The idea is simple: your time watching a video is valuable. The notes that should come from it — the structured, searchable, reviewable kind — should not require an extra hour of your day. NoteWise automates that step. Point it at a YouTube URL and walk away with local Markdown study notes that are deeper and more useful than most people would write by hand.

Where it shines:

• 📚 Students catching up on lecture recordings or supplementing textbooks with YouTube explanations
• 🧑‍💻 Developers staying on top of conference talks, tutorials, and technical deep-dives without watching at 3x speed
• 🌍 Language learners extracting structured notes from native-language content
• 📋 Researchers quickly distilling hours of talks into organized, searchable reference material
• 🏢 Teams turning internal video presentations into shareable written documentation

The output is not just a transcript summary. It is structured, hierarchical Markdown with headers, sub-topics, definitions, examples, and concepts explained in depth. Chapter-aware videos can be split into per-chapter files, and long courses can be processed into organized local notes. Everything lands in your filesystem: portable, searchable, and permanently yours.

Quick start

uv tool install notewise
notewise setup
notewise process "https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID"

Generated notes land in ./output by default.

Prefer another install method?

# Try without installing
uvx notewise --help

# Standalone binary installer
curl -fsSL https://notewise.click/install | sh

Windows PowerShell:

irm https://notewise.click/install | iex

See the full installation guide for uv, uvx, pipx, pip, Docker, and standalone binaries.

Demo

_{Watch the full demo: demo/notewise.mp4}

Documentation

Common commands

notewise process "https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID" --format md,docx --quiz
notewise process "https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAYLIST_ID"
notewise transcript "https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID" --format json
notewise inference list
notewise doctor
notewise update

notewise update checks the latest release and prints the right upgrade command group for standalone binary or Python package installs. Run notewise --help or open the command reference for the full CLI surface.

Development

git clone https://github.com/whoisjayd/notewise
cd notewise
uv sync --dev
make test

Website work uses Bun from website/:

bun install --frozen-lockfile
bun run lint
bunx tsc --noEmit
bun run build

Docs live in docs/. Do not run Prettier on Mintlify MDX; validate docs config with:

python -m json.tool docs/docs.json
node --check docs/umami.js

Read CONTRIBUTING.md before opening a PR.

License

MIT with Attribution. If you use NoteWise in a project or build on top of it, include credit and a link back to this repository.

Thanks

NoteWise is built on a great open-source ecosystem. See GRATITUDE.md for acknowledgements.

Found a bug? Open an issue. Security concern? See SECURITY.md.