Sourcenote

Most AI note apps write the notes for you. That is the wrong job. In a randomized classroom study of 405 students (Cambridge University Press & Assessment and Microsoft Research, 2025), students who took their own notes understood and remembered more than students who only used an AI chatbot. And AI summaries fail quietly: in a 2026 Georgetown and University of Washington study, summaries left out about half of the central details, and people who read a misleading summary answered correctly 44.8% of the time, versus 83.6% after an accurate one. Sourcenote keeps the student writing and makes the AI the checker. It is a desktop app (Mac and Windows) that turns a lecture recording and its slides into evidence, then checks the student's own notes against it: - Lecture in, evidence out. The recording becomes time-stamped transcript segments; every slide is read as an image, so a chart counts as evidence, not just its axis labels. - Bring your own notes. Type or paste them, or import a photo or PDF of handwritten notes. The lines are copied word for word, mistakes included, so the check sees what the student actually wrote. - What's wrong. Each sentence is matched to its evidence (a moment in the recording, a slide page) and judged against only that evidence. Unsupported sentences are marked "Not in sources" with the reason. In the demo, "the loss falls fastest with a learning rate of 0.001" is caught because the slide 3 graph shows the opposite. - What you missed. The notes are compared with the lecture's verified key points, and the ones left out are listed with links to the exact moment and slide. - Cited summary and questions. Every summary sentence cites the recording or a slide and is verified the same way. Questions get cited answers, or "not covered in this lecture". - 25 languages. Each note has its own lecture language and note language: an English lecture can become Vietnamese notes, and the same mistake is caught from the same slide. It is built for the students with the most to gain: those studying in a second language, and those who receive note-taking accommodations. Everything was built during the hackathon: the repository was created on October 27, 2026. Built-in sample notes open without an API key ("Open sample note"). Download: https://github.com/1jsjs/sourcenote/releases/tag/v0.1.0 (the Mac build is signed and notarized; the Windows build comes from CI).