Our Story: Behind AINOTE and iFLYTEK
Think by hand. Powered by AI.
AINOTE was born in the age of AI. We built it to bring your handwriting and AI together — so the busywork takes care of itself, and you're left with more room to think.
We still believe in handwriting.
It calms the mind and sharpens thinking the way typing never will. For most of history, pen and paper were how we did it. But paper has limits. It can't keep up with a fast conversation, and what you write gets buried or fades with time.
So many of us moved on — to iPads, to e-ink tablets. They helped. We could finally store everything. But storing isn't remembering. Our notes still pile up — captured and then forgotten.
We wanted to keep what's good about writing by hand — and fix what it never could.
More than a notebook.
We didn't want to give up writing by hand — but we were tired of losing what we wrote.
So we kept asking: why can't a notebook be easy to write in — and just as easy to search? That question became AINOTE.
We shipped our first one in 2018. Fifteen products and 2.5 million users later, we're still chasing it.
One half is the writing — it's why AINOTE 2 comes in at 4.2mm and 295 grams, light enough to disappear in your hand, so nothing stands between you and the page.
The other half is AI.
It turns your handwriting into words you can search, hears what's said across languages, and keeps what you capture in order — so nothing you write is lost again.
Behind it, iFLYTEK has spent 25 years on one hard problem: teaching machines to understand human speech.
Together, the two do what a notebook alone never could. We brought it to your desk — not to speak for you, but to keep up with you.
We didn't want to give up writing by hand — but we were tired of losing what we wrote.
So we kept asking: why can't a notebook be easy to write in — and just as easy to search? That question became AINOTE.
We shipped our first one in 2018. Fifteen products and 2.5 million users later, we're still chasing it.
One half is the writing — it's why AINOTE 2 comes in at 4.2mm and 295 grams, light enough to disappear in your hand, so nothing stands between you and the page.
The other half is AI.
It turns your handwriting into words you can search, hears what's said across languages, and keeps what you capture in order — so nothing you write is lost again.
Behind it, iFLYTEK has spent 25 years on one hard problem: teaching machines to understand human speech.
Together, the two do what a notebook alone never could. We brought it to your desk — not to speak for you, but to keep up with you.
We're never quite done.
Getting this right takes years — and we're not finished.
To make writing feel real, we studied more than a hundred rollerball pens under a magnifying glass: how the ink pooled when you pressed, thinned when you rushed, caught when you tilted the nib.
To keep the body thin without losing battery, we developed our own — 2.15mm, two weeks on a charge. For the frame, we used the same material as a Mars rover. None of it is something you'll notice while you write. That's exactly the point.
And we don't do it alone. Before AINOTE 2 shipped, we put early units in the hands of nearly a hundred people around the world — managers and professionals in education, tech, and finance — and asked them to be honest. They sent back 458 things to improve. We worked through them.
We're still listening. The next one is already taking shape — the same way every AINOTE has: with the people who use it.
You keep the thinking.
AINOTE takes the busywork, so your time can go to the thinking.
The transcribing, the summarizing, the sorting — the parts that used to eat your evenings — AINOTE takes those. You write by hand. You keep the thinking. AINOTE does the rest.
That's what we're building toward: the first AI-powered modern parchment — paper-like to write on, intelligent underneath. You bring the ideas. It keeps up — and hands you back the hours to have more of them.
For thousands of years, a page held what mattered to one person. AINOTE still does — it just keeps up now, and never forgets. We built the parchment. What you write on it is up to you.