Making video a better medium for learning, working, and creating.
Video has become the dominant way people learn and share knowledge. University lectures are recorded. Corporate training happens through webinars. Developers learn new frameworks from YouTube tutorials. Creators review hours of footage to produce a final cut. Yet despite this shift, the tools we use to take notes on video content have barely evolved beyond a text editor and a pause button.
Notch was built to close that gap. We believe that when you watch a video with the intent to learn, create, or collaborate, your notes should be tied to the moments that matter. Scrubbing back through a two-hour recording to find the one sentence that sparked an idea is a waste of time. Notch eliminates that friction by anchoring every note to a precise timestamp, so clicking a note jumps you directly to the relevant moment in the video.
The idea for Notch came from a simple frustration: taking notes during online lectures meant constantly pausing, switching to a separate app, typing, switching back, and losing context. That workflow is broken. Notch replaces it with a single, integrated environment where the video player and your notes live side by side, and every note knows exactly where it belongs in the timeline.
Most note-taking tools treat video as an afterthought. Notch treats it as the primary input. The entire interface is designed around the relationship between what you see and hear and what you write down.
Our AI transcription and note generation features are designed to augment your thinking, not substitute for it. You stay in control of what matters, and the AI fills in what you might have missed.
Notch does one thing well: timestamped video notes. We intentionally avoid becoming a general-purpose note-taking app. Focus enables a better experience for the specific workflow we serve.
At its core, Notch is a web application that pairs a video player with a note-taking panel. You can load videos from three sources: YouTube links, direct video URLs (MP4, WebM, or any browser-supported format), and files uploaded from your device. Once a video is loaded, you take notes in real time. Each note is automatically stamped with the current playback position, and clicking that timestamp later seeks the video to the exact second.
Beyond manual note-taking, Notch offers AI-powered features. The transcription engine uses Google's Gemini models to convert spoken audio into a full, timestamped text transcript. Once a transcript is available, the AI note generator can analyze the content and produce structured, topic-based summaries — each linked back to the relevant portion of the video. These generated notes appear alongside your own, giving you a comprehensive record of the video's content without requiring you to capture every detail yourself.
Organization happens through notebooks. You can group related videos — say, all lectures from a single course, or all recordings from a project's weekly meetings — into a notebook. This keeps your workspace tidy and makes it easy to find past notes when you need them. Search works across all your notes and transcripts, so even months-old content remains accessible.
Notch serves anyone who works with video regularly and needs to extract, organize, or reference information from it. Students use it to keep up with lecture recordings, especially when courses move quickly and reviewing material before exams is critical. Researchers use it to annotate interview recordings or conference presentations. Content creators use it to review raw footage and plan edits with timestamped annotations. Professionals use it to turn recorded meetings and webinars into actionable notes without rewatching entire sessions.
The common thread is that all of these people need a way to connect their thinking to specific moments in a video. General-purpose note-taking apps cannot do this. Video players with basic comment features do not go far enough. Notch sits at the intersection, purpose-built for this workflow.
Notch uses Firebase for authentication and data storage. Your notes, transcripts, and uploaded files are stored securely and scoped to your account. We do not sell user data. We do not run analytics trackers beyond what is necessary for the service to function. When you use the AI features, your video content is processed through Google's Gemini API to generate transcripts and notes, then the results are stored in your account. We do not retain or use your content for training purposes.
The free tier provides a generous token budget for AI features, and the Pro tier expands that budget for heavier use. This model lets us sustain the service without relying on invasive data practices.
Notch is a full-stack TypeScript application. The frontend is built with React and Vite, styled with Tailwind CSS, and designed to work well on both desktop and mobile browsers. The backend runs on Firebase Cloud Functions, handling AI processing, billing, and data management. The AI pipeline uses Google's Gemini models for both transcription and note generation, with a chunked parallel processing architecture that handles long videos efficiently.
We chose this stack for reliability, speed, and developer productivity. TypeScript end-to-end means fewer bugs and better maintainability. Firebase provides scalable infrastructure without the overhead of managing servers. And Gemini delivers state-of-the-art AI capabilities for transcription and summarization.
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