How to Use Genei as a Student for Increased Productivity

Meet Genei (jee-nee)

Genei is an artificial intelligence (AI) powered research tool for reading, annotating and note-taking. As a student, genei can streamline your research process, allowing you to stay on top of readings, and help you prepare for essays, presentations, assignments, and exams. In short, genei produces AI-powered summaries of your reading material, and allows you to compile notes using summarisation and paraphrasing features. If you struggle to work through your reading lists, and maintain focus for long texts, genei can help. Especially if you find reading daunting and struggle to read critically. Below, we’ll outline all of genei’s features, and share how you can use this research companion throughout your studies. 

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Core Features of Genei

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Genei’s core features can help you as a student to: 

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• Stay organised. Your reading material, annotations and notes will live in one place using genei’s document management and file storage system capabilities. Reading materials can be organised using Projects and Folders and your progress can be tracked by marking files as read and unread. This provides a space to manage all your readings for modules, assignments, and exams. Beyond file storage, genei acts as an all-in-one research workspace where you can read, annotate, take notes, and optimise your workflow using draggable tabs. 

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• Read faster. Using the power of AI, genei produces an overview of your reading material, enabling you to read 70% faster. In the Document Overview section, genei provides AI-powered summaries, a document outline, a list of keywords, and extracts graphs, tables, figures, images, links, and references. Genei has a new and improved summary workflow to make extracting information faster. This allows you to skim articles and check their relevance with ease, but also begin working through reading material in an efficient way. 

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• Collate reading material. You can upload reading material by dragging in a PDF file, or pasting a link to a web-page or PDF. But, what if you’re looking for new literature? You can search for new material using genei’s search features with keywords. Alternatively, using the references generated in the document overview, you can add those papers to your current literature by clicking on the links directly. You won’t need to Google each individual reference to find those relevant papers. Finally, you can also generate a citation for the article in a variety of formats, and begin adding these to reference management tools, such as Zotero and Mendeley. 

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• Compile notes and annotations. You can annotate your reading material with highlights and comments. In the notepad, notes can be made for individual documents, or across a project folder. From the document overview, you can add the AI-powered summaries and keywords to the notepad with a click. You can also highlight sections to be summarised, paraphrased or added as is to your notepad. All these notes will remain linked to their original source, which you can find simply by selecting the information in your notepad. You can link your own thoughts, and notes to particular sections via linked notes too. This provides an easy way to compile meaningful notes and avoid accidentally plagiarising later on.

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• Start writing and planning. You can add headings to the notepad, and begin organising the notes by dragging sentences or paragraphs into a new order.  In genei 1.0, your notepad now includes to-do lists, equations, images and more to help you plan, outline and write based on your research. This is an ideal way to begin forming a plan or structure for your writing. If you’re a genei pro member, you can make use of advanced AI writing features that are powered by GPT-3. These features allow you to expand, rephrase or summarise notepad content and give you a headstart on the writing process. 

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How to use Genei as a Student

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For Readings

You can make it through those reading lists 70% faster with genei. Keep track of your learnings, thoughts, discussions and to-dos in the notepad for each document or project folder. This can help you to prepare for seminars and discussions, build insights to use in assessments, or develop your knowledge of lecture materials with extended reading. You’ll be better able to make valuable contributions in lectures and discussions, and feel confident that reading isn’t being neglected from your study routine. 

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For Essays

A well-written essay requires a good amount of research, critical reading and organisation. In genei, you can organise your readings and lecture notes (convert them to PDFs!) in one place, and begin developing your ideas using the Document Overview. The notepad can be a place to compile notes, organise your essay structure, and begin summarising or paraphrasing key points of the reading material. To aid your reading process, you can also add critical reading questions to the notepad with checkboxes. Being able to read, annotate, and note-take in one space throughout will enable you to work more efficiently, make connections between ideas, and re-organise content as needed. You’ll have more time to edit your essay, and refine critical points. Learn more about genei and critical reading here. 

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For Presentations

Presentations are best when they’re focused on a few core, yet engaging points that speak to your audience. However, learning to summarise a vast amount of material, while juggling other assignments and readings can be difficult. Genei is an ideal tool for researching, summarising and planning the material for your presentation. If you’re creating a presentation based on your own essays or reports, genei can summarise the core points, outline, and keywords for you to organise and edit in the notepad. Check out our step-by-step guide for creating presentations using genei for more detail. 

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For Exam Revision

Preparing your exam material early means you can implement effective study routines and techniques, such as active recall. In genei, you can use the notepad to compile lecture note summaries and reading notes in one place. Throughout the term, you can build up notes of summarised and paraphrased facts, figures, and insights from your lectures and readings. This information can be used to prepare exam material for active recall and revision, such as flashcards and questions lists. You can scope your subject using the document outline and notepad, and get a broad overview of how information is interconnected. Once your lecture notes, and relevant readings have been prepared, you can focus on exam practice and memorisation. 

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Check out our active recall and study routine guides:

• A Guide to Active Recall: Top Tips and Tools for Revision
• Active Recall Revision Techniques for Different Types of Exams
• A 4 Step Guide to Curating an Effective Study Routine 

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For Summary Writing

Research reports, essays, posters, and presentations all often require us to produce a summary of the content, whether that be in the introduction, conclusion or both. AI-powered summarisation can guide you and enable you to include the key bits of information. For example, the document outline can provide anchor points to mention in your own summaries, and help you narrow down a piece of research. You can also use the keywords extracted in the document outline to refine your points. 

For Literature Reviews

A literature review requires reading, note-taking and insight building across a long period of time. Being able to link notes, compiled across project folders is an ideal feature for working on a literature review. You can not only store and manage all your readings and notes in one place, but also work on the go across devices, as everything is assigned to your genei account. You can expand your literature review search by adding references from your existing papers, and make meaningful  connections between these sources. Your notes, thoughts, critical observations, and reading material living in one interconnected place can improve you research workflow, and allow you to refine your knowledge overtime, 

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For Your Research Workflow

Genei alone is a powerful research tool for annotating, planning and writing. However, genei can be added to your workflow alongside other tools, such as reference managers, like Zotero and Mendeley, or alongside note-taking and revision tools such as Notion and Anki. You can explore our digital tool guides for students here: Digital Tools for Students and the Exam Season.

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