Show HN: Chat Apple Notes – RAG and Semantic Search for Apple Notes

2 points

a year ago

Hey HN! We're Yash and Rohan and wanted to share a small weekend project built out of personal need. Chat Apple Notes brings semantic search and Retrieval Augmented Generation to Apple Notes on CLI using just your OpenAI API key for simplicity.

The Apple Notes app, even after the Apple Intelligence updates, has no semantic search or RAG capabilities. Since there's no official API or export functionality for Notes, we used a workaround using AppleScript to extract notes, then created a simple CLI tool with three core features:

- search: Semantic search across all your notes

- ask: RAG-based Q&A using your notes as context

- chat: Interactive chat that maintains context from previous conversations and references relevant notes

The tool requires zero setup beyond an OpenAI API key (stored locally). No hosting needed - all vectors are stored in OpenAI's vector store. We focused on keeping it dead simple to setup and use.

Demo: https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/3f62b195-d580-46c...

GitHub: https://github.com/yashgoenka/chat-apple-notes

Would love fellow HN'ers who use Apple Notes extensively to try it out!