“Second brain” type of thing (iOS26 only)

I’ve seen many people wanting a sort of second brain, a shortcut (or anything) in which you can dump things and eventually being able to search for stuff from this thing.

I have made a relatively simple shortcut that works kind of like that.

To be precise it works like that:

There’s a menu, you choose either to add a “memory” or to search it.

If you add one it will take the following info Screenshot (from which ChatGPT extracts text and summarizes) Current date and time App on screen Links, phone numbers or email addresses if present on the screen (it might not take it from every app as it uses the Get what’s on screen action) User input (you can add info or details like “I need to remember this for Uni”) Current address (to search for stuff by location)

If you search for a “memory” it will: Find the note Use the Private Cloud Compute AI model to search the note for whatever you want and you can also continue the chat by asking stuff related to the note or not related.

Why ChatGPT for the extraction and summary? It works well with the extraction and avoids useless info like if there’s a menu with the text “menu” it ignores it most of the time, but if it also does the summarization it’s practically flawless

Why PCC for the search? There’s a limit on the characters you can write for a question to the AI models with the Apple Intelligence shortcut action, for ChatGPT is 250 characters, for the on device I don’t know but it’s low but for the PCC is 5.000 characters.

The good

• It works

The bad

• you’ll get over the character limit very fast
• can’t save images (I could add this to this shortcut but there’s a 250 photos limit per note)
• can’t save files like excel, pages and so on.

Questions and answers

Why is it called BRAIN 3.0 instead of 2.0? Well I started with the 2.0 which is folders and files based but I had some issues with it so I’ve made the 3.0 for now :)

What I’m going to do about the limitations of the current shortcut? I’m in the process of making BRAIN 2.0 work properly, but until then it is what it is :)

Shortcut link:

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/22ff68a391ce4ca0a64a0b8cf8fb6a31

If you have any advice, question or criticism feel free to comment :)

EDIT: for those coming after the edit, here’s the new version, it works with files so as long as you have memory available on your phone it will work.

BEFORE DOWNLOADING THE SHORTCUT, find the Shortcuts folder in your Files app, and there you should add 2 new folders, one called “THE BRAIN” and one called “LAST MEMORY” don’t add spaces randomly or whatever.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/8dce0352330746e5a2576ec9740332c4