TheBrain 14 explores remarkable new frontiers of AI [REVIEW]

Last year, when I reviewed TheBrain 13, I shared how impressed I was with the way in which its developers had begun to integrate AI into its functionality. TheBrain 14 makes even bigger leaps forward, extending AI to the desktop and offering a wealth of useful new functionality.

In the world of AI-enhanced visual thinking tools, TheBrain has emerged as the undisputed leader, showing us what’s possible with this powerful technology.

Let’s take a look at the latest advances in the Windows version of this powerful visual knowledge management tool.

Add thought structures to your brain with AI

TheBrain 14 gives you several options for adding content to your visual brain. When you click the AI button on the application’s toolbar, you’re presented with a dialog box that contains a surprising number of options:

First, you can rephrase your query from the name of the currently-selected topic to something that may be more descriptive for the AI engine. You can create a new thought structure, which builds out a hierarchy of thoughts several layers deep, or add child thoughts, which limit the AI-generated content to a single level.

If your query is too general, you can select an existing thought within your brain to act as a “context thought“ to help the AI to focus its output.

Next, you have the option of telling the AI engine to format its output as categories or lists of information. Depending upon your needs for your current project, you may want the AI to produce one type of information or the other. The fact that it enables you to select which one you need is admirable.

While it’s working on building a thought structure, TheBrain displays a progress indicator at the top of the work area – nice!

Another level of control over the AI’s output

The developer points out that TheBrain has always been a place to capture, organize and use YOUR knowledge. But AI-generated content is not created by you, obviously. That’s why TheBrain 14 displays newly-added AI content with an animated border. A dialog box in the upper left corner of the workspace gives you the options to accept, redo or discard the AI-generated topics.

I’m not a fan of visual thinking tools that simply dump AI-generated content into the structure of your map. I ultimately want to have control over what gets added and what doesn’t. I like the approach TheBrain 14 takes.

If you need more details, you can select any thought in your brain and run another query.

Adding AI-generated topic notes

One of the developer’s priorities was to ensure that TheBrain doesn’t just limit its use AI to a simplistic question-and-answer format, like most of today’s AI tools. They really wanted to push the limits of what it can do. Accordingly, the AI-enhanced notes functionality of the TheBrain 14 can:

• Generate notes from scratch
• Summarize a note – useful for automatically creating a concise overview of a longer note
• Rewrite the note – in many different creative formats. You decide what style to rewrite it in.
• Correct the spelling and grammar – especially useful for cleaning up long, dictated content.
• Toggle between the new version and the original – overview the merged changes, with changes color coded
• Organize a note – Helpful for making sense of a long note. The AI adds headings and makes long notes much easier to skim.
• Expand existing text. Really useful for generating a in-depth note from a list of bullet points.
• Auto-complete note – useful if you get writers block
• Extract action list from a lengthy note
• Translate an entire note or a segment of it into 78 languages

What’s interesting is when TheBrain 14 completes its AI-generated output, it displays the same accept/redo/discard buttons, but with another control. It enables you to view the new version of the note, the original and a merged version, which displays them both together. The new text is displayed in green and the old text is crossed out and appears in red.

This feature helps you make more intelligent decisions about what to do with the new AI-generated content. You don’t have to go, “Dammit, what did it look like BEFORE I submitted a query to the AI??!”

You can just toggle between the views and see what has changed. In this context, the merged view is the most useful of all, because you can see by word, sentence and paragraph what the AI is proposing to change about your original note.

Another interesting twist about the note AI tool: You can set a limit to the number of words you want the AI to generate – up to 1,000 words if you want to collect more extensive research, or as few as 50 if you just want a concise overview.

Other improvements

TheBrain 14 enables you to conduct searches across all of your brains, not just the one you have open. That means you don’t have to store all of your accumulated knowledge in a single brain. You can maintain a library of smaller, purpose-built brains for each of your major projects, ideas and initiatives. You can click on an item in the search result and immediately jump to that location in the brain where it’s contained.

Brainbox, the browser extension that has enabled users of TheBrain to capture content from web pages, has been enhanced for version 14. Rather than just being a digital “junk drawer” where you can capture now and organize later, the new version of Brainbox gives you three options:

1. Send the web content to Brainbox (its classic behavior),
2. Append it to an existing thought or
3. Make it a child of an existing thought.

This new functionality enables you to keep your research findings well-organized within the structure of your brain, not stuck in an overstuffed repository of items that you’ll review and distribute some day – when you’re not so busy.

You can capture entire web pages as notes, graphics and all. So even if the web page disappears at a future date, you have an archived copy of it in your brain.

Conclusion

I’m delighted to report that the developer of the brain 14 is taking an aggressive stance toward AI, yet is doing so in a way that respect common sense and provides real value. By giving you a set of controls to shape your queries – plus the option to keep, redo or discard its output – I’ve come to the conclusion that TheBrain 14’s AI model actually encourages experimentation.

I’m also quite impressed by the portfolio of AI options TheBrain 14 gives you for enhancing your notes. Many are quite helpful, such as using AI to help you get unstuck when you’re facing writer’s block or summarizing a lengthy note and extracting action items from it. This is wonderful stuff that goes well beyond the simplistic question-and-answer model that most AI tools offer today.

For anyone who needs to do research, both the visual and note AI tools will be a real productivity booster. Although if your research requires that you keep citations for your sources, the AI doesn’t do that – yet. Perhaps in a future version of TheBrain?

It will be fascinating to see where the developers of TheBrain take this AI-enhanced visual knowledge and information management tool next. I’m sure it will be amazing!