The best teacher is the one who's still in the room when you're ready to ask the question.
What it is.
AsideMe is a live tutor that listens to your class with you. It writes everything down, indexes it, and gives you a place to ask questions you didn't want to interrupt to ask. The answers reference what was actually taught — not what a model thinks the topic is usually about.
It also generates study material from your real transcripts: structured summaries, multiple-choice quizzes, flashcards. You can export them as Markdown or PDF and revise on the train.
What it isn't.
AsideMe is not a recording app you process later. It works while the class is happening. It isn't a replacement for attendance — it's a backup for the moments attendance can't quite keep up with the speed of a coding instructor.
It's also not a general-purpose AI chatbot. It only knows what your class has talked about, plus the materials you've added to the library. That's the whole point.
What it won't be.
AsideMe will not log your audio. It will not log your transcripts beyond what's needed to make retrieval work on your own machine. It will not sell your data — there is no second business model. The deal is: you pay $9 a month and AsideMe works. That's the only deal.
AsideMe will not become a "platform." It is a single-purpose tool. The day it stops being good at the one thing it does, it will be gone.
The technical commitments.
- No analytics SDKs tracking your behavior. Server logs are minimal and rotate.
- Self-hostable source code, MIT licensed. Self-host gets full source and zero vendor lock-in.
- Keyword-based search — not opaque embeddings — so you can always see what part of your transcript the answer came from. Faster on a phone. Nothing to keep running in the background.
- Multiple transcription services with automatic failover so the cursor never stops if one of them has a bad afternoon.
- PWA-first: install it on your phone, browse your class library on the train, generate when you're back online.
- Cost-protective by default: per-tenant rate limits, spending caps at the provider level, idempotency on generation requests.
Who's building this.
AsideMe is built by Novotny Pope at Beat Dump Inc. in Franklin, TN. It started as a Full Stack Academy capstone and is being hardened into a real product because the capstone version answered too well to throw away.
The point is not to build a unicorn. The point is to build a thing that does one job, charges fairly for it, and stays out of the way.