Breef

Breef is a note-taking and study app for people who learn from their own material. Students, medical students, researchers and lifelong learners bring what they already have, lecture notes, books, papers, slides and recordings, and Breef gives them one place to turn it into something they actually remember. You write in plain text that formats as you type: a heading, a list, a task, a maths formula, an image dropped in. Ideas link to each other with double brackets, and every note shows the notes that point back to it. Projects group notes by course, book or goal, and subjects tag and colour them. Open Knowledge and all of it is drawn as one graph, with a replay of how it grew over the months. Over time your notes stop being a pile and become a map of everything you know. Then Breef makes sure the map stays in your head. A note comes back a day after you write it, then three days later, then a week, and less and less often each time you remember it. You can review by reading it through, answering questions written from it, or going through your own cards. Give a course its exam date and its notes return more and more often until the day before. The heavier lifting is handled too. Record a lecture inside a note and Breef writes it up into a study note with sections and key points, with the transcript underneath and the audio never kept. Drop in a PDF of slides and it comes out as linked notes. Ask a question in your own words and the answer comes from your notes alone, citing the ones it used. Breef even points out the topics your notes build on that you haven't written about yet, shown as gaps on your map. Any note or project can be shared at a page of its own, readable by anyone with the link. Notes are private until then, stored in the EU, and never used for advertising or training. Breef runs in the browser in English, Italian, Spanish, French and German. The core is free forever; Pro adds more voice hours, more storage, and unlimited use of the smart features for €6 a month.