How Can You Turn Your Thoughts Into a Visible Ideas Board? I Spoke to an AI Company About it

"One card might show the pros and cons of living in Palo Alto versus Vancouver," Chau explains. "Another might list moving considerations, immigration info or other related topics."

These cards let you explore multiple ideas at once, compare options side by side and dive deeper through suggested actions on each card. This visual, interactive approach helps you think through complex problems in a way traditional chatbots don't.

When you drag in content like PDFs, spreadsheets, links and images, those files become part of the workspace. Cove ingests and learns from your uploads, using them to inform its suggestions and build a board that evolves as your project does. 

Similar to a chatbot, this deepens the workspace's intelligence over time, making future insights more relevant and specific to your needs. But it's more like continuing a dialogue with a tool that remembers what matters to you. 

I see it as an integrated workspace. It doesn't require me to search for old threads, desperately trying to find what I was working through days prior (which is something I've repeatedly wished I could do with ChatGPT).

Who should use Cove?

What genuinely excited me about Cove is how it feels like it was made for "snowball thinkers" like myself -- rapid brainstorming with a need for visualization as my ideas evolve.

Given how deeply personal and ongoing these projects can be, data privacy is fundamental. Since privacy is a common concern around AI tools, I asked Chau how Cove handles it. 

"A lot of what we're doing is leaning on these large LLM model providers and their fundamental policies," he tells me. "But we also want to make sure that from a user data privacy standpoint, we have the right policies as well." 

These policies include maintaining control over your data when you're using the app, such as a toggle to opt out of having your content used for AI training. 

As for who uses Cove, Chau suggested the "chief household officer" juggling one project after another. Education has also emerged as a significant use case, with students adopting Cove for collaborative research and iterative drafting. Entrepreneurs use it, too -- as a virtual co-founder and thought partner or a place to lay out brain dumps for team clarity.

How to use Cove to brainstorm and share ideas 

Ready to try it for yourself? Here's how to go from idea to execution inside Cove, which exists on desktop and as a Google Chrome extension. 

1. Head to and click Get Started to sign up with Google or by creating an account. 
2. Cove uses an "infinite" canvas. Each idea is represented by a card, which can contain things like text, attachments, images and tables. These cards can be added endlessly to your canvas.
3. There's also an option to paste URLs, and Cove will create cards with fetched content from the web, as well as things you upload, including PDFs, pitch decks and working docs -- or use empty text cards and generate content from there. Cove will generate images you describe in a new card, too.
4. Using these cards, you can create a mind map of different ideas, where you're dragging cards around, zooming in and out and reorganizing them. It also has the capability to predict what you're going to need next, working in real time to create something that serves your initial prompt or purpose. 
5. Open the chatbot at the bottom right of the screen, where you can interact with the AI tool and use it to highlight cards that have been created, or select multiple and ask Cove's AI to connect them together and find patterns or ways of thinking. 
6. Now, use your cards to create AI-powered tools right in your canvas. Describe what you want and Cove will auto-generate an app based on your context or needs. You can customize it as much as you need and then deploy a new app within your workspace. 
7. Since Cove was made for collaboration, you can invite teammates into your workspace for real-time ideation and process feedback. (You have agency over who accesses your workspace -- think of it like a virtual desk.) 
8. There's also the option to share your app cards or choose to Publish to Gallery, which is how you can make your workflow public or to share a tool that others can duplicate.
9. Lastly, revision history allows you to keep ideas evolving without losing work. Since everything is divided by your app cards, there's the possibility for focused edits or individual-turned-collaborative experimentation.

For more information on how to use Cove, head to the support page on its website, and check out this demo video, which visually walks you through the process above.

Chau sums up the vision simply: People using Cove are "working through a long-term problem."

"Over time, we hope to use that information as frameworks for tackling those problems, so more users can benefit," he tells me.

Ultimately, Cove creates space for non-linear output -- think of it less as a tool and more of a partner in thoughtful growth and discovery -- one that you can share with others who are equally interested in understanding the brain's layered, intricate process. 

Happy thinking.