🦉 OWL-Note

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Save AI chats, transcribe videos and keep Markdown notes, free, in your browser.

Your notes are encrypted bookmarks, synced by the Chrome or Edge account you already use. No OWL-Note account, server or subscription.

➜ Add to Chrome / Edge — free

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✨ Features

Save AI chats as real Markdown

Right‑click a chat → OWL‑Note → Rebuild LLM chat to OWL‑Note

Turns a ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini conversation into an editable note, not a screenshot:

• Each message labelled with who said it
• Headings, paragraphs, lists, links and tables
• Code blocks that keep their language
• Math as LaTeX, rendered with KaTeX
• Supported images as attachments, and a link back to the source

It runs on your device, with no API key and no tokens. On other sites it rebuilds the page's readable content, without speaker labels. Sites change their pages, so if a chat comes out wrong, please report it.

Turn a playing video into a transcript

Right‑click a page → OWL‑Note → Live Transcription save to OWL‑Note (Chrome 139+)

• On YouTube, a video with subtitles is saved at once as a timestamped note, in the creator's own words.
• Otherwise Chrome's on‑device speech recognition transcribes it live, with a caption overlay you can drag.
• The audio is never stored or uploaded.

Ask Owl: find notes by what they mean

Ask in plain words and get the passages that answer, with citations that jump to the note.

• Keyword search works straight away. Semantic search is optional, after a one‑time download of about 130 MB. Ask "How many cores does my Apple have?" and it picks the laptop note over the apple crisp recipe.
• With your browser's on‑device AI (Gemini Nano in Chrome, Phi in Edge) it writes the answer too. The browser downloads the model once, about 2–4 GB, if you choose to enable it. Without it, you get the matching excerpts.
• Summarize a note, Tidy its Markdown without rewriting your words, or get a suggested title.
• Works in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Capture from any page

• Capture entire page to OWL‑Note scrolls and stitches the whole page into one long image, opened ready to mark up.
• Save selection to OWL‑Note keeps the selected text as Markdown, with its headings, lists, links, code blocks and tables.

All of it is processed on your device.

A full Markdown notebook

• Live preview and automatic saving
• Syntax‑highlighted code, KaTeX math, and Mermaid diagrams
• Nested notebooks, pinning, and multi‑select
• Search from the top bar or the browser address bar, and find text inside a note
• Photos and file attachments, a sketchpad, and marking up photos
• Phonetic Assistance shows pronunciation above the words: IPA for English, hiragana for Japanese, Jyutping for Cantonese
• Trash you can restore from

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🔒 Privacy and Sync

• Notes are stored as bookmarks, encrypted with AES‑256‑GCM so other extensions can't read them. Titles stay plain text, so they come up in the address bar.
• They sync through your Chrome or Edge account, under that provider's terms. The key travels the same way, so this protects notes from other software, not from your browser vendor. Set a sync passphrase if that matters to you.
• No OWL‑Note account, backend, telemetry or ads. Capture, transcription, search and AI all run on your device.
• A bookmark holds about 8 KB per note. Larger notes, photos and files stay on that device unless you turn on the optional Google Drive sync, which stores them in your own Drive. A transcript passes 8 KB after roughly 15–20 minutes.
• Back up your encryption key. Without it, your notes can't be opened after a reinstall. Drive sync does this for you, or use Export → Recovery key.
• Install OWL‑Note on each device to read your notes there.

Read the full privacy policy.

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📦 Installation, Import, Export

Install

• From the Chrome Web Store, for Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers.
• From source: run npm install and npm run build, then load the dist/ folder as an unpacked extension. Google Drive sync stays off in your own builds unless you add your own OAuth credentials.

Import

• Evernote ENEX
• Word DOCX
• Markdown and Markdown ZIP
• JSON backups
• .owl‑note packages

Export

• Every note as Markdown in a ZIP
• A note as PDF, or as a portable .owl‑note package

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📖 The Story

I built OWL‑Note from a simple belief: people have the right to take notes for free.

Writing down thoughts is natural; it shouldn’t be over‑engineered or locked behind subscriptions.

So I set one constraint: use only infrastructure people already have and make the simplest, most private note app possible. That constraint shaped every design choice:

• Notes live as browser bookmarks — private, portable, and synced automatically by the Chrome or Edge account you already use.
• When a note exceeds bookmark limits, an optional Google Drive layer stores the overflow.
• AI features run entirely on the browser’s on‑device model — no servers, no API keys, no per‑question billing.

Every constraint made OWL‑Note lighter and more personal. It isn’t a cloud platform — it’s a notebook you actually own.

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🤝 Feedback

• Found a problem? Open an issue.
• If OWL‑Note is useful to you, a ⭐ here or a review on the Chrome Web Store helps others find it.

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🆓 License

GPL‑3.0

Source code: https://github.com/hinagate/owl-note

Mermaid

Diagrams are drawn by Mermaid (MIT), shipped unmodified under mermaid/ in the extension. The licence notices for Mermaid and the code it bundles are in mermaid/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt.

Pronunciation data

The phonetic reading tables are generated at build time from third‑party dictionaries and shipped as data files. They are not part of the program's source code, and each keeps its own licence:

Table	Source	Licence
ipa-en.tsv.gz — English IPA	CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (Carnegie Mellon University)	ISC
kana-ja.tsv.gz — Japanese kanji readings	yomi-dict	Apache‑2.0
jyutping-yue.tsv.gz — Cantonese Jyutping	rime-cantonese (CanCLID), vendored in vendor/rime-cantonese	CC BY 4.0

jyutping-yue.tsv.gz is adapted from rime-cantonese's character and word dictionaries and is distributed under CC BY 4.0.