The Centre for Accessibility used to provide peer notetakers for students that needed notetaking support. Everyone in the course received an email, offering them a chance to apply. If hired, they would upload their notes within a few days of each class for the student with the accommodation.
Alas, the year is 2026 and AI comes for everything sooner or later; this accommodation is being phased out. Replacing it is Genio Notes, an AI tool that the CfA describes as “a purpose-built note-taking platform.”
Genio records lecture audio during class. After recording, it generates a transcript and outline of the class, as well as study tools like AI-generated quizzes based on that transcript. You can also supplement the audio recording with typed notes, images, drawings, LaTeX-like formulas, uploaded slides and more.
On the surface, this seems potentially useful. I’ve never had a peer notetaker, but I was allowed to record my courses to help with my ADHD. That accommodation is also being replaced by Genio.
Most modern phones have various AI tools, like transcription, built into their recorder apps. Certainly, I have made use of the transcription functionality of my Google Pixel. If Genio can exceed what my phone can do — and it certainly promises to — that seems great!
It can’t.
To test Genio, I attended the July AMS Council meeting in which our student union resolved to write to UBC regarding concerns with Genio. Throughout my testing, I encountered a ton of issues; some are minor nitpicks, others are deal-breakers.
An important caveat: the council recording is nearly five hours, much longer than most classes. Genio is processing more data, and that may make it perform worse than it would in, say, an 80-minute lecture. That said, multi-hour classes still exist.
First of all, Genio is very resource-intensive. When I was recording the AMS meeting, I saw Genio’s CPU usage in the Firefox system resource monitor spike to over 100 per cent — meaning Genio requires more than one of your CPU’s processing cores. For context, as I’m typing this article, Google Docs is sitting at around 10–20 per cent.
Software provided for accessibility should not require the processing power I’ve witnessed Genio use. This comes amidst a major RAM shortage, which is making powerful computers even more expensive and cheap computers weaker. Students requiring accommodations may have more difficulty earning a stable income than students who do not, making those powerful computers less accessible to them.
At the same time, it may be difficult to deal with the trials and tribulations of Genio on a less powerful computer, especially when it can directly impact a student’s experience in class.
Another major issue with Genio is its ability to handle mathematical formulas, diagrams and other common elements of STEM courses. Genio can transcribe formulas that are spoken aloud. It’s better than I expected it to be: it understood that an integral “with respect to t” is transcribed as “dt” and that the magnitude of a vector is expressed with vertical bars. But it definitely isn’t good enough.
The problem is that — without typing formulas yourself — Genio relies entirely on what is spoken. Formulas are rarely spoken aloud in full. Specific transcription details like whether a letter is uppercase or lowercase are even less likely to be said.
When there’s a diagram that cannot be spoken, Genio can’t capture it. Yes, there are workarounds: the professor may provide their notes, you can take a picture of the board or you can write it yourself. But those aren’t good alternatives. The last thing I want to do in a difficult class is scramble to take out my phone and capture everything on the board before it gets erased.
As an astronomy major, diagrams and formulas are prevalent in my courses. These issues would kneecap Genio in nearly every course I’ve taken. In fact, I also tried to test Genio in a 300-level math course over the summer. That didn’t last long, because Genio provided very little benefit over a standard audio recording while also being more of a hassle.
CfA Director Wendy Norman addressed these concerns when asked by AMS council, writing that Genio allows for the inclusion of photos, uploaded slides and more. She added that peer notetakers rarely recreated complex diagrams by hand; instead, they often included their own photographs.
I’m sure this is true, but I think there’s a very important middle ground that’s missing: many diagrams are simple enough to draw by hand in class but still cannot be captured by Genio. Lewis structures, a type of diagram used in chemistry, consist of a few letters, lines and dots — simple enough that I was copying them into my notes during my high school chemistry classes.
Genio has a feature to add drawings, but unless you have a tablet and stylus (or you’re remarkably good at drawing with a mouse), you have to get out your phone and take a photo.
Using Genio makes it feel like neither the developers nor the CfA had science and math students in mind. While other classes can have difficult-to-transcribe elements, these are more common in the sciences. This accommodation disadvantages students in the sciences, despite their need for the same support as students in other fields.
Genio also just doesn’t feel like it was made with care. The mobile app seems to simply be a website that has been “wrapped” into an application. These types of apps are glitchier and less pleasant than ones built specifically for iOS and Android. I’ve seen Genio take at least seven seconds to load a transcript. The only ways to export notes and transcripts are to copy them to your clipboard or to print them to a PDF (or paper). I still haven’t found a way to export the outline.
The AI study tools are … mediocre at best. My editor and I found the five-question, AI-generated quiz about the AMS Council meeting to be surface-level. When I asked someone else in the Ubyssey office to take it, Genio promptly froze as soon as she clicked on an answer.
I could keep going, but the point is that Genio just feels frustrating to use. I don’t want to deal with annoying software while sitting in class any more than I want to deal with capturing photos of the lecture notes.
For the most part, Genio is not fundamentally flawed. The product issues — the poor performance, the clunky UI, the mediocre AI tools — can be fixed by Genio’s developers continuing to work on it.
The only unsolvable issue is that Genio relies primarily on audio, but that’s a problem with the implementation, not the product; it simply was not the right type of product to replace peer notetakers.
The remaining implementation issues can be addressed by systematically providing alternative notetaking support in situations where Genio is likely to fail. While the CfA commits to individualized accommodations on a case-by-case basis, a more general alternative option would alleviate some of the concerns about Genio, both mine and AMS Council’s.
To be clear, the peer notetaker system was not perfect either. The Ubyssey’s News Editor Juan Pablo Sastoque Vega spoke with Jaylenn Tourangeau, a UBC student approved for notetaker accommodations, for a story about Genio. Tourangeau emphasized to Sastoque Vega that they were only assigned a notetaker once, but the notetaker did not regularly upload notes.
In that respect, Genio is an improvement. The accommodation is always available (barring outages), rather than reliant on an unknown quasi-random student who might fail in a myriad of ways. Norman emphasized this in her response to AMS Council, saying that reliance on peer notetaking had “several persistent challenges,” including “unreliable quality and timeliness of notes.”
Genio is always accessible but produces flawed results, whereas a peer notetaker, though potentially unreliable, is capable of much better results. I never had a peer notetaker, so it’s hard for me to say whether this reliability is worth Genio’s shortcomings — but it is a compelling improvement.
Yet, I’m also concerned that Genio introduces data privacy issues. Genio doesn’t create its own AI models. Instead, the company works with third-party partners such as OpenAI, which they claim will never train AI models on Genio user data, presumably including lecture recordings. Genio does, however, use randomized samples of transcriptions to perform “quality assurance checks” and to evaluate improvements and potential new features for “product research and development.”
To be clear, this is a lot better than developing an AI model using customer data. Recordings won’t be fed into a model for training. Nothing a model produces for other users will be based on those classroom recordings, contrary to the claims of some AMS councillors. They aren’t being stolen. That said, it’s still concerning — especially since the recordings aren’t just of the student using Genio, but also of the professor and the other students.
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There’s still a lot I want to learn from the CfA. For example, we don’t know how else the CfA might use generative AI to provide accommodations, how the CfA sees it working in STEM courses or UBC’s evaluation of the data privacy issues.
Unfortunately, neither I nor The Ubyssey’s News section has had any luck learning more. When Sastoque Vega reached out in July to schedule an interview with Norman, he was told by Thandi Fletcher, the acting director of UBC News and University Affairs, that Norman was away until mid-August. Instead, he was given a statement that didn’t answer most of his questions.
When I reached out a month later to request an interview with Norman (and offered to wait until she returned), Fletcher told me on Aug. 14 that UBC had nothing more to share. She gave me the same statement Sastoque Vega had received, even though I was a different reporter in a different section who asked different questions that still weren’t answered by the statement. Fletcher didn’t mention Norman’s absence to me, despite it being the reason provided to Sastoque Vega in July for not scheduling an interview.
To add insult to injury, Norman responded in-depth to AMS Council’s letter regarding Genio on Aug. 27, less than two weeks after I was told that UBC would not provide further comment.
Engaging with the AMS but not The Ubyssey prevents the student body from providing informed perspectives about Genio. While AMS Council meetings are open to the public, they can be hours long with inaccurate time estimates and they operate under, often confusing, parliamentary rules. In contrast, The Ubyssey’s reporting is meant to be understandable and accessible for the whole UBC community — including the student body. Without more information about Genio, our reporting — in both the News and Opinion sections — is limited.
I’ll be writing more about Genio as the school year continues. I’m eager to see how people with the former peer notetaker accommodation find the new replacement. (If you had that accommodation and are willing to speak with me, please contact me at l.grossman@ubyssey.ca.) I’m especially eager to see how the CfA approaches the issues I’ve raised.
I think Genio has potential. But as it stands right now, it’s just not a good product.
