Lore

The whole point of Lore is speed. Press a global shortcut and a hover chat bar appears on top of your screen, ready for input. You type a sentence and it's stored right away, no save button, no picking a notebook first. That low friction is what keeps a capture tool from collecting dust.

You get information back by describing it, not by remembering where you filed it, and that difference matters more than it sounds once your notes pile up past a few hundred entries. Ask a question in natural language and Lore searches your stored thoughts before answering. Want to know what you jotted down during standup? Just ask. It can pull results by topic or by date, so "what notes did I write at daily today" actually works.

It isn't a form you fill in. Lore reads your input and sorts it automatically into a thought, question, command or instruction, which is the part that makes the app feel less like data entry and more like talking to something that understands what you meant.

Todos live alongside your notes rather than in a separate app. You can add items conversationally, list what's pending, mark things complete and organize them by priority and category. It's basic task tracking, and it's the kind of thing you'd otherwise open a second tool for.

Behind the scenes, Lore runs a retrieval-based pipeline against your own data. It finds the relevant context from your notes first, then hands it to the local model to draft an answer. The effect: answers come from what you actually wrote, not from a model's general knowledge.

Both the AI model and the database run on your machine through Ollama and LanceDB, which means your notes and the model that reads them never leave the device they were captured on. No cloud. No API keys. No account. If your laptop is offline, this desktop AI assistant still works. For anyone whose notes contain anything sensitive, that setup is the main reason to pick it over a hosted note taking app.