Introduction

What ThinkEx is and how it helps you think.

ThinkEx is a visual thinking environment where you bring your sources — PDFs, YouTube videos, audio files, websites, and notes — onto a single canvas, then work alongside AI that sees exactly what you point it to.

Most tools split thinking from AI. Chat interfaces reset every conversation. Note apps bolt AI on as an afterthought. ThinkEx keeps your sources, reasoning, and AI in one place so knowledge compounds instead of disappearing.

Key features

Adding content

Place PDFs, YouTube videos, audio files, images, and websites on your canvas as cards.

AI chat

Select exactly which cards the AI reasons over. No opaque retrieval — you control the context.

Flashcards and quizzes

Generate study materials directly from content in your workspace and save them as persistent cards.

Sharing and collaboration

Share workspaces or invite collaborators with viewer, editor, or admin permissions.

Why ThinkEx

Most AI and note-taking tools make a trade-off that costs you:

Approach	Examples	What you lose
Chat-first	ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude	Insights vanish into scroll. Context resets every conversation.
Notes-first	Notion, Obsidian	AI is isolated from your actual information.
Retrieval-first	NotebookLM	Sources are hidden behind the interface. You can’t see or work with them directly.

ThinkEx takes a different approach: you see everything the AI sees, you choose what it works with, and every insight you extract stays in your workspace. Nothing disappears into a black box.

ThinkEx is also open source, so there is no model lock-in and the product is driven by the community.

How it works

1. Create a workspace

   Start from a blank canvas or use the Getting Started template, which includes sample cards to orient you.

2. Add your sources

   Upload PDFs, paste YouTube links, add websites, record audio, or write notes. Each source becomes a card you can arrange spatially.

3. Select context and ask

   Click to select the cards you want the AI to work with, then ask your question. The AI reasons only over what you’ve chosen.

4. Capture insights

   Save responses as knowledge cards — documents, flashcards, or quizzes — that persist in your workspace across sessions.

Ready to begin?

Quick start

Create your first workspace and start thinking in minutes.

Self-hosting

Run ThinkEx on your own infrastructure with full control over your data.