Obsidian gets an AI agent

Dear Scholar,

While I absolutely love AI, I always found that the AI agents underwhelming. They were slow and made many mistakes. However, this week I was diving deep into the Google's Scribe plugin which enables the use of an AI agent within Obsidian.

For the first time, I feel that the AI agent was truly useful because it either did something that I wouldn't be capable of or would be too lazy to do. Going forward, I think Gemini Scribe is a must-use plugin for serious note takers. In this week's article, I describe exactly how to set it up and show you a number of use cases for academics or knowledge workers.

Compared to other AI plugins the AI agent is capable of combining multiple steps: Writing, reading and editing your notes, internet search, and browsing external websites. The uses cases presented in this article are: (1) Orgnaising your notes by pulling multiple sources and internet search, (2) accessing most recent publications from nature.com and filtering what is relevant to you based on your notes, (3) organising your notes and creating structured tables from messy notes, (4) rewriting and editing text, and (5) automatically pulling all relevant papers/ideas when creating new notes.

Free Webinar: Lit Reviews with Paperpal

In the upcoming webinar, I will discuss a few new features Paperpal has released and show you how to use them. You are going to learn to:

• Use an AI-assisted workflow to read and understand academic papers with smart digital note-taking
• Synthesise insights from multiple papers
• Turn research notes into writing with AI support, while keeping full control of the narrative
• Avoid overreliance on AI by protecting critical thinking, originality, and academic integrity

The webinar is free, and a recording will be available shortly after. Date: Feb. 12th. Click the button for more details.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

​
Ilya Shabanov, The Effortless Academic​

This is the weekly Effortless Academic Newsletter. It consists of an in-depth tutorial and additional events, promotions, or relevant information for the AI-curious modern academic. I strive to consistently provide value with every email. If this is not relevant to you, you can always unsubscribe from everything and will never hear from me again. If you find the email somehow inappropriate, please reply to me and let me know what you didn't like.