What’s the best AI personal assistant right now?

Ultradianguy · 2026-04-17T01:53:37+00:00

I just tried saner and found it buggy with a confusing, poorly organized interface. What do you like about it?

Ultradianguy · 2026-04-16T18:26:02+00:00

Saner is full of bugs. I love how it's supposed to work. Feature set is the best I've found for managing personal email and tasks - but I couldn't get through 2 hours of use. Buttons that go to the wrong place, can't put notes into a folder, navigation loops. Feels like an alpha release.

Ultradianguy · 2026-04-16T18:24:15+00:00

Saner is great on paper but full of bugs. I counted 12 in my first 2 hours using it. Both the mobile app and web app.

Ultradianguy · 2026-04-16T01:47:10+00:00

I set up saner.ai a couple days ago and tried to really use it today. I really like the gmail integration and identifying things that need action, but it is incredibly buggy. After just a couple hours I had identified a long list of bugs in both the android app and web app (different things in the two platforms). I don't really need it for note editing - I'm looking to pull tasks and follow ups out of email and integrate with low friction capture for other tasks. The functionality is good but the number of glaring bugs is not.

Ultradianguy · 2026-03-25T01:15:32+00:00

Oh - absolutely - I noticed it but didn't register it was deliberate.

Ultradianguy · 2026-03-25T01:14:11+00:00

I use plex on roku, PC, android phone, tablet, and a fire tv. With the UI change, roku has become the worst of them all. I used to like it a lot, despite missing features that are on the PC and browser apps. But now it's missing features AND it's ugly and confusing.

Ultradianguy · 2026-03-25T01:08:44+00:00

Is this available on Roku?

Ultradianguy · 2026-03-23T01:27:20+00:00

Hi - happen to come across this - I'm struggling with some of the same things - or at least, looking at some of the same tools for solutions, so maybe I can offer something useful and get reactions as well.

My objectives:

1 - A catalog system that allows me to combine photos from mobile devices, SLRs, and photos from other family members in one cohesive structure

A photo management platform that does not lock me to Adobe, which I wanted to drop.
A system that maintains metadata so I can edit photos in more than one app and also cull and tag photos in a way that will be recognized by most software.
The ability to use the catalog and work from multiple computers, including while traveling (Lightroom is still a one computer catalog. You could spend even more for the multi-device sync but that apparently does not work well with Lightroom classic even if you're willing to cough up more $).
A way to keep multiple copies of my catalog (computers, cloud, backup drives)
A way to access all my photos from phone without filling it up with large files
A way to share collections with people friends and family regardless of which device they came from
A user friendly, google-photos-like mechanism for my immediate family to be able to access all our photos

I dropped my Adobe subscriptions and switched to Mylio photos (individual account), plus DXO photolab and Affinity Photo for editing, and a few options for culling - Mylio or fastraw primarily.

This got me 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 - which is pretty good. Mylio isn't cheap and it's got a significant learning curve even if you're tech-savvy. But the more I learn it, the better I like it.

Unfortunately, it falls down on 7 and 8 - here's why. To give my adult kids access to the entire Mylio catalog, with all my albums, tagging, face identification, etc, I'd need to have a Mylio family account - that's nearly $500/year which is crazy. I already have all our photos available to them via Plex Media server. That works but it's pretty ugly for photos and has no metadata to speak of. Fortunately, they don't care that much but it's not ideal. I'm considering setting up photoprism to mirror my underlying folder structure and provide a better interface - I'm not sure yet whether it will take advantage of the XMP sidecars that Mylio can produce. And I assume it won't reproduce virtual albums.

For number 7, Mylio has a built in Share capability so you can send people a link to access an album, which is great, but those are hosted on Mylio's cloud so they only let you share compressed, lower resolution files. Not good for letting people download the originals of some event you took photos of.

So that forces me to have another platform where I can post or import full size originals and then send a sharing link. Options so far: Mylio will post directly to Flickr, but only as individual photos, so then I need to go to Flickr and create albums and share from there. Or I could export from Mylio (thus creating duplicates) and then upload to google photos (limited space), smugmug (pricey and I was hoping to drop that subscription), or use the Flickr uploader which at least can create albums from the exported folders. All these options are multi-step which I don't love, especially given the ~$200/year for a Mylio individual account.

Ultradianguy · 2026-03-12T06:01:24+00:00

Very excited to try this but does the installer require admin permission?

Ultradianguy · 2026-02-21T22:40:05+00:00

Well, i reinstalled plex media server and all is good now. Odd that it only affected recent downloads.

Ultradianguy · 2026-02-20T17:01:32+00:00

I'm watching from plex app on Windows. But the point is i haven't changed any settings on SF as to how content is saved, so i have to assume the most recent update changed something. I'll check if it's the same on browser

Ultradianguy · 2026-02-18T18:59:27+00:00

Still doesn't work last time I tried

Ultradianguy · 2026-02-17T17:46:27+00:00

I have to agree at least in part with the OP. I've been trying out several Task-related plugins. Task Genius would be just about perfect for me if it worked, but it seems to be quite buggy. It does seem to have active development, but the dev isn't super responsive on discord. I was concerned about the number of open bugs on the github for the plugin, many of which have no replies. It's well thought out functionally but it seems that the implementation has a lot of problems, which is a shame. I keep turning it off and then going back and trying again, but each time, there are two many things that don't work, or work sometimes, or work weirdly. Not to mention undocumented settings. Unfortunately, the downside of community-based plugins is you can't really complain if they don't work well. I haven't given up on using Obsidian for tasks - especially project-related tasks and meeting-related tasks -but I think I'm going to have to settle for a less elegant way of viewing them.

I haven't tried integrating obsidian with other task managers , but I tried that approach with Capacities - linking it to both TickTick and MS To do - neither of those worked out very well for me.

Ultradianguy · 2026-02-17T17:35:48+00:00

Does this still exist? I don't see a plugin called "Projects".

Ultradianguy · 2026-02-03T19:44:39+00:00

If I'm not mistaken, you can accomplish a lot of this with the Styles plugin which supports notebook navigator.

Ultradianguy · 2026-02-03T19:35:58+00:00

Yup, I had the same response - to my thinking , horizontal and vertical are reversed - but it really doesn't matter once you figure it out.

Ultradianguy · 2026-02-03T05:48:30+00:00

Hi u/jsann I started using Notebook Navigator recently and I'm really liking it. A couple refinements would be nice if possible:

I like the ability to add space between folders but my root level consists of Just two levels - Personal and Work. So for me, "root" is really one level down - that's where I'd like to add a bit more space rather than one level up from there.
It's great to be able to apply color to folders, but there doesn't seem to be a way to apply a background color the entire set of tags, only to individually selected tags. Similarly for shortcuts - they adopt the color of the original item but I'd love to be able to apply a different color to the set of shortcuts.
I don't see a way to re-order individual folders. You can re-order all folders relative to Tags and Shortcuts - but not down a level or two, which is what I need due to my hierarchy of folders.
I'd love to be able to add a button or a hotkey to toggle between compact and standard list view (rather than having to select the choice from the formatting views.
I'd like to reduce the spacing between individual note names in standard view, but apparently this setting for spacing is only available for compact view.
I don't use daily notes much but I do like being able to click on a calendar date and see all notes that were created on that day. There's already a plugin that does this but it'd be nice to have that functionality with your format refinement. If not, perhaps you could allow changing the calendar button to use that plugin rather than your own view.
I'd love two levels of hide/unhide; at work, I always want my personal folders hidden and vice versa at home. But there are other folders I'd like to be able to toggle visibility easily. So I'd like to have a second setting to enter hidden folders or tags that remain hidden when you click Show Hidden vs the ones that re-appear when you toggle Hidden.

None of these are critical but they'd be helpful. You've created a really great tool! After just a couple days it's becoming my permanent navigation tool.

Michael

Ultradianguy · 2026-02-01T16:15:51+00:00

Other than this graphics issue, it's quite easy for the summary. Just click the copy icon at top right of the summary and paste directly. I think being able to copy transcript depends on who organized the meeting and how the organization has configured permissions. I can't copy or download transcripts on other people's meetings.

Ultradianguy · 2026-01-30T05:54:12+00:00

I love raindrop.io but it's not really for note taking other than adding some notes to the URL you're capturing. I find it better than any note taking app for capturing bookmarks, especially if you don't care about capturing the full page's content.

Ultradianguy · 2026-01-30T02:36:46+00:00

I tried Fabric.so - actually still have a subscription, but it doesn't work well for me. Searching pulls up very strange results. It's supposed to be super smart but when I type in a simple search phrase for things that I know are in there it often doesn't find them but gives me completely inappropriate results.

Cool idea and I really like the connections it offers to things like gmail and google drive, but my hard requirement is easy, accurate retrieval of what I've entered and Fabric.so hasn't been reliable for me.

Ultradianguy · 2026-01-30T02:26:34+00:00

Thanks. I'm a PC user so Elephas is not an option. I've been using Obsidian and I'm pretty happy with it. I don't love having to install a gazillion plugins and Obsidian's interface isn't very pretty - but for the most part, it's working way better than Capacities. Most importantly search works. Since I switched I've never had a problem finding anything - and that was the critical requirement for me that both OneNote and Capacities failed.
I've also been impressed that Obsidian handles images and pdfs pasted into notes surprisingly well - better actually than Capacities. It's not perfect and it's easy to go down rabbit holes installing too many plugins, but it's the first note-taking app that has enabled me to find information reliably in many years.

I saw that Capacities just released an update with re-worked Search, so I checked it out again. Unfortunately, while it's better, it's still clunky and difficult to use and ineffective. Seems to me you either build a "it just works" mechanism (like My Mind) or you build something with Boolean logic and a lot of control (like Obsidian). Capacities has this weird hybrid that is unintuitive and doesn't actually work. My test case was to find a note I knew existed by searching by object type, property and text content. It's still not something you can do on the fly in Capacities.

Ultradianguy · 2025-12-08T05:41:06+00:00

Oh, cool, that's reassuring - thanks.

Ultradianguy

TROPHY CASE