Handwriting intelligence for learners
Inkling reads how you write during a lecture: the pauses, the erasing, the rewrites. It turns them into a learning timeline of mistakes you fixed, gaps you still have, and the exact lecture moment behind each one.
Built on a modern AI and data stack
Demo · 2:59
A student takes notes on a chain-rule lecture, gets one step wrong, fixes it, and Inkling shows what the final page would have hidden.
Lecture clip: MIT OpenCourseWare 18.01, CC BY-NC-SA
Try it
Write, erase, and rewrite in the same spot. This is the core idea behind Inkling, running right here in your browser.
A number, a word, an equation. Pick a pen size and colour.
Only the ink under the eraser goes, and it stays behind as dashed ghost ink.
Inkling pairs the rewrite with what you erased.
How it works
Four steps, running quietly while you take notes the way you already do.
Calculus IThe chain rule00:18
Learning timelineCalculus I, the chain rule
00:00–06:00
Features
Built around one idea: getting something wrong, then right, is where the learning happens.
Help in your language
“Explain it again inEspañol”
Pick a language to see how Inkling re-explains the same mistake: d/dx sin(x²) = cos(x²).
Olvidaste multiplicar por la derivada interna, 2x. La derivada de sen(x²) es cos(x²) · 2x.
Who it's for
For anyone who has nodded along, then realized three slides later they were lost.
See the lecture the way your students experienced it, not only how they scored.
Privacy
Inkling looks closely at how you learn, so it's built to keep that close too.
Sessions live in a SQLite file on the machine running Inkling, or in a Postgres database you choose, such as Tiger Data.
Teachers see patterns, never people: no names, ids or handwriting, and nothing shared by fewer than three students.
AI help receives the lecture excerpt and the before and after of one revision. Provider keys stay on the server and are never logged.
Demo mode runs from saved, hand-checked answers with no network at all, ideal for a classroom with unreliable Wi-Fi.
FAQ
Short answers to what people ask most. Something else on your mind? The assistant answers from the same facts.
Inkling is a note-taking canvas for lectures, designed for iPad and Apple Pencil, that keeps what you erase. Erased handwriting stays on the page as dashed ghost ink. Inkling notices where you hesitated, pairs each erase with the correction that replaced it, and links every moment to the second of the lecture it happened in. After class, your session becomes a learning timeline of corrected misconceptions, open gaps and breakthroughs, each with a short AI re-explanation and a check question.
It compares you with yourself, not with a class average. The first couple of minutes of your writing set your personal baseline. After that, Inkling scores each 10-second window on three signals: writing slower than usual, erasing more than usual, and going quiet while the lecturer keeps talking (pen pressure is also used after the session when it's reliable). When the combined score crosses a threshold, that moment is flagged. A live meter on the capture screen shows steady, slowing or stuck as you write.
When you erase, Inkling keeps the strokes as dashed ghost ink that you can show or hide in review. It groups erased strokes, then looks for new writing in the same spot within about 20 seconds. If the new ink overlaps the erased area enough, the two are paired as a revision: before and after. That pairing is what turns an erase into a corrected misconception or a breakthrough, instead of a mistake that silently disappears.
Help cards, check questions and the session recap are available in 10 languages: English, Spanish, Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, French, Telugu, Korean, Vietnamese and Brazilian Portuguese. Arabic is shown right to left. Any re-explanation can be read aloud, using an ElevenLabs voice when one is configured, and the browser's own voice otherwise. Inkling also speaks a short, encouraging recap of each session.
Yes, alongside it rather than instead of it. Compare with Notability takes a PDF export of the same notes from Notability and lays Inkling's process over the final page, side by side or with an overlay slider, and counts what the final page hides: erased attempts, corrections, open gaps and breakthroughs. Export for Notability downloads a session as a PDF you can open in Notability, with ghost ink, labelled moments and a page of re-explanations.
Inkling is local-first. By default everything is stored in a SQLite file on the computer that runs Inkling, or in a Postgres database you choose, such as Tiger Data. AI provider keys stay on the server and are never logged. When an AI provider is configured, only what a moment needs is sent: the lecture excerpt and the before and after of that revision. Inkling uses the microphone only in Live lecture mode, after you press Start; your browser's speech service does the transcribing. The teacher view is anonymous, and demo mode never touches the network. Handwriting and lecture text are treated as untrusted data in every AI prompt.
The teacher view shows where a class slowed down or started erasing, on the lecture's own timeline, in 30-second buckets, and suggests the three stretches most worth re-teaching with the lecture excerpt for each. It is anonymous by design: no names, ids or handwriting leave the analysis, a count is only shown once at least three students share a moment (k-anonymity, k ≥ 3), and a class smaller than three gets no view at all.
Signal Lab lets you inspect which signals fired for each moment and why. Detection has been checked against hand labels of where a student was confused, but only on a small labeled demo set, not a benchmark, so treat a flagged moment as a strong hint rather than a verdict. The in-app evaluation page at /insights/evaluation shows the details, including how the threshold changes what gets flagged.
Use Open Inkling at the top of this page, or watch the three-minute demo. To run it yourself, the source is on GitHub: npm install, then npm run dev. npm run demo seeds a sample student's sessions and serves a production build that works with no network at all, which is ideal for trying it on an iPad over local Wi-Fi.
Take notes the way you already do. Inkling keeps the part other apps throw away.