Imagine if your notes could talk. Away, you paperclip! No one likes you! Imagine if they could actually respond to your questions, if they were eager to tell you what they know. They'd be like a trusted thought partner or a collaborator who happens to have instantaneous access to everything you've ever captured or written down.
That's exactly what Notion's new Q&A Assistant makes. possible. The AI accesses your entire Notion workspace and instantly surfaces the right information along with links to the relevant pages in your workspace.
This really solves kind of the paradox at the heart of taking notes. The more of them you collect, the harder it is to find what you're looking for amidst all that stuff. If Notion is your second brain, then Q&A is like your personal librarian.
In this video, sponsored by Notion, I'll take you on a tour of what Q&A is capable of using real examples from my own second brain. Let's start with the very basics. There's actually two separate ways of activating the new Q&A feature.
The first way is to simply get your mouse and click this little black and white sparkle icon in the bottom right corner, which now appears in every page in Notion. You can see it brings up this little kind of chat window where you are now free to talk to the AI. The AI only has access to documents that you already have permissions for. If I want to do a search of my company documents, I can do a search here.
But if I want to do a search of my personal notes and my personal knowledge, I need to go all the way down here to my own personal, you can see here it says private information. Now let me show you the second way of activating the Q&A feature. Let's say I have a specific idea that I want to know more about such as this one. You'll notice as soon as I select a piece of text this little toolbar comes up and at the very left side of the toolbar there is now this little button that says ask AI.
If you click it it brings up a little window here that I can also ask questions. What other information in my notes do I have that relates? to these ideas and note that it knows what I'm talking about when I say these ideas because I've selected these terms. So I'll go ahead and hit return.
Okay, interesting. So it's searching through other notes and I'm noticing it's searching through notes about climate change, which are most related, but also some things that may not necessarily seem related, such as AI, such as collective self-building, such as home buying, such as house flipping. I'm not even sure how those are connected. But let me just ask, please tell me more about how, let's just say, home buying is related to the effects of climate change.
Okay, interesting. So now that I'm seeing these, I do remember reading or consuming some of these sources. But what's so fantastic about this is it's explaining the bullet points.
Previously, it just gave me some bullet points that didn't have much context. But now it's kind of giving me a full description how climate risk relates to the opportunity for buying real estate in new areas. How the city of Duluth, which is a specific city, is dealing with the effect of climate change.
Look at what I've just done. All I've really prepared in advance is I've dumped a bunch of messy random notes on a class that I took into Notion. And all the subsequent organization and structuring and... picking out insights and connecting to ideas such as climate change and home buying.
All of that was done through the most intuitive natural interface, which is conversation. This is really the power of integrating artificial intelligence with a note-taking and knowledge management tool in one place. The first use case I'll show you is creating proposals or outlines. Often I'm thinking of starting a new project and I like to write almost like a project brief, just my initial thoughts and ideas on what it might look like, what the goals are, how we'll go about it, but that's hard work. So let's see if Q&A can help us.
So I'll go ahead and click the sparkle icon and then I'll say, please write an initial proposal for an in-person conference for building a second brain. drawing on my experience teaching courses. So I'm kind of giving it a guideline, which is to not just invent a conference from nothing, but specifically to draw on my experience teaching courses.
I want to recreate some of that energy and excitement that I've seen. people benefit from in the past. So I'll hit return and there we go.
The conference will be a physical platform for the vibrant building a second brain community to connect, learn, and share. It's fantastic. You can see it's drawing on multiple notes.
This is an incredible synthesis of different ideas from across many different documents. It's definitely an initial proposal. I want to go through it and expand on it, remove parts, add parts, kind of refine and make some edits.
A second use case that I like to use Q&A for is collect. and collating together information from a lot of different sources. So let me show you what I mean.
I'll go ahead and open Q&A. And let's say I'd like to know what are all the different movies that I've watched or that I want to watch or that I've mentioned in any context in my notes. So please give me a list of all the movies or you could do books or courses or people or anything you want mentioned anywhere in my notes. This is great. Notice I didn't have to sit down and spend my own time and energy creating a document called Tiago's Favorite Movies or Movies Tiago Wants to Watch.
With just a few minutes of work, I've been able to surface movies like The Gladiator and it sounds like there's other examples in these different posts that I might want to dive into deeper if I have time. The third use case that I like to use Q&A for is almost like an enhanced search. Often you'll do a search for a term.
and it returns nothing and you think, oh, I guess I don't have anything. But it's actually that you have related ideas that just don't happen to use that specific term. So I'll try an example here. I'll say, please show me all my notes and documents related to philosophy. So you'll notice nothing really comes up.
It says none of the documents specifically mention philosophy. And when I think about it, it's true. I'm not really interested in philosophy generally itself.
It's more about the philosophy of creativity or the philosophies of work. So let me actually now iterate on that search and improve on it by asking it, okay, please expand the search to include topics like attitudes and mindsets toward Creativity and work. Interesting.
So this time it's found six different possible sources. Some of them I can see that I've written. Some are just notes for our website.
Some are articles I've written. Other ones are things written by other people. What I'm actually going to ask it next, and this is something that normal search absolutely cannot do, is to now synthesize those. I'm actually curious, what is my philosophy toward work?
You might want to come up with something like this for a resume or a bio or a proposal or to raise money or who knows. Someone might ask you, what is your elevator pitch? What is your attitude towards something?
And the ability to use AI to draw from multiple different kinds of sources is really powerful. So let's ask it, please write a biography summarizing my overall philosophy toward work. And there we go. This is actually really good.
I'll be speaking at a big conference in March and I think I will actually take this, open up my task manager and say, email this bio to the festival organizers and hit tab and paste it right there. It's really saved me probably 30 minutes to an hour of work. The fourth and final, and really in some ways the most powerful use case, is to summarize existing knowledge.
See, often you know things, but you've been don't know exactly what you know. But that knowledge, or at least parts of that knowledge, exists in your second brain, in your note-taking app. So one example is, I'll say, summarize my insights and learnings about how to create a high-quality audio-visual setup for effective online teaching. This is something that I have a vague sense that I have some content about, but I've never written about it. I've never organized and tried to compile all my insights about it.
And there you go. It's given me a four point, essentially an outline or summary with multiple specific documents that have been cited, which I'm free to dive into if I want. One idea this actually gives me is what if I created a product like an ebook or even a course for people who want to create a high quality audio visual setup. So one thing I could ask AI to do is to please write.
sales page for an e-book about how to create high quality audio visual setups. I'll even give us some details. Include the features and benefits and some examples of the kinds of lessons I'll teach. And there we go. I mean this is just incredible.
In a matter of minutes I've gone from A bunch of messy, random notes spread across all sorts of different pages and folders in different places to a succinct and honestly quite compelling, at least the beginnings of a sales page that might make me real money, at least as a small side gig. You may have noticed that a lot of this functionality already existed as part of Notion AI. But there's three key differences that Q&A adds on. The first is this little chat-based...
conversational interface. Previously all the interactions with the AI had to happen right here in the page itself, which meant all the text that was generated you now had to decide, do I keep it? Do I delete it? I really like that this conversational interface makes it clear that this is just a conversation.
If you want to keep anything from this conversation, you have to proactively do that. The second big difference is citing its sources. As we've seen, instead of giving you some text that you have no idea where it came from, or whether it's specific or accurate, it's actually citing using those little numbered bubbles exactly where everything came from. So you can dive in deeper and kind of check it yourself. The third big difference is that it's persistent.
What that means is this little window in the corner here follows you from one page to another to another while preserving almost like a memory whatever you've been talking about. Instead of your interactions with the AI being limited to one specific place in one page, it can range across many different sources. It follows you as you traverse and roam through your knowledge landscape. Though, of course, you can always hit the clear button if you just want to start over.
Instead of having to copy and paste again and again, back and forth into a separate chat tool, getting one little output at a time and trying to piece them all together, you can have that same capability to talk with your notes right within the software that you use with your full knowledge library accessible to you. Now. How can you get access to this amazing tool?
You can find all the details in the description below. What are your favorite use cases for Notion's Q&A? Leave a comment below. I'd love to hear them.