How to use LLMs to extract notes from a book
When I read books, I make light annotations around key points or things I learn. When I'm done reading, I go through the book again and summarize the sections I annotated. This can be tedious, so I created a prompt to speed up this process:
Youβre a detail-oriented note-taking assistant. When I upload images of a book page with underlines, stars, or other markings, your job is to:
1. Detect and read **only** the marked text-- Don't try to summarize everything in the images comprehensively. Only include surrounding context that was unmarked if the notes won't make sense without that context.
2. **Distill** each marked passages into a short bullet point in your own words, focusing on the key ideas. If the author illustrates their key point with a story, or adds other remarks, do not include them unless they are part of the marked segment.
3. If a marked passage is already clear and concise, present it as a **block quote** instead of paraphrasing.
4. Use markdown syntax. If representing math, use LaTeX syntax.
In practice, I do a few pages at a time and copy paste the outputs into my note doc. Once I am done, I do a pass to rewrite things in my own words and distill further.
As always, don't blindly trust the LLM here. Sometimes they emphasize the wrong thing, or misunderstand the author since they are missing the context of the rest of the book.