AI-infused

Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 19, 2025 at 11:26 AM

I’m very late to the AI party, in fact I’m still just looking in through the window, wondering whether to go in…

But I did find the latest AI extension for RoamResearch intriguing, especially the feature (3. Ask Your Graph Agent) where you can ask the agent to query and summarise your notes in the Roam graph:

https://roam-research.kit.com/posts/commentarii-roamani-roam-live-ai

I haven’t used Roam as a knowledge base (I’m mainly using it for organising my daily todos and as a journal of what I’ve got done), but with this extension I can suddenly see the appeal of Roam as a Zettelkasten.

While even this extension can offer many different uses of AI, my main interest is to be able to query my knowledge bases (such as my reading notes, my own research notes, and my personal diary entries), to gain insights which otherwise would be difficult or very time-consuming to get or ones that I might not even think of.

I gather that NotebookLM offers this capability, plus I’ve seen other options where you can create a library for an AI solution to query locally (such as the HP AI Companion) or point an AI agent some other way to query a local folder on one’s hard drive.

So I’m shopping around for a solution where I could accomplish the above, in a way where I could control what level of privacy I’m willing to give up for each query (e.g. HP AI Companion does give you the option to keep the query on the machine, or to use a cloud AI).

For instance I wouldn’t want to share my personal journal entries with an online AI (though I could query them with a local small language model on my laptop), but I’m less precious of my reading notes.

Interestingly, the above Roam extension does allow for specifying different privacy levels, but it’s hard to know what that means and in any case Roam data is already in the cloud.

Anyway, I’m wondering what your experience has been with this sort of “querying your own notes” use of AI agents, if anyone here has some experience with all this to share.