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

CNET

2 days ago

After more than a year of researching, reviewing and writing about artificial intelligence, I've been wanting to learn more about AI as a thinking and planning platform. While it's a great tool for streamlining work, it's also being used in more creative ways, and I've been curious about my own thinking style.
Why do I see connections and visualizations when someone speaks? Why do I often feel like I'm not just listening and digesting information, but instead, piecing through what's being said and translating it into a deeper connection point?
"Problem solving, thinking… It's a journey you go through where you need to be able to have that freedom to explore," Stephen Chau, the co-founder of AI platform Cove, tells me.
The story of Cove began with Chau and his co-founders Andy Szybalski and Michael Chu experimenting with AI, only to realize that something was missing. AI needed to work more like a human collaborator -- and that means thinking in flexible and responsive ways, while able to support complex, ongoing projects.
So why do most AI tools still feel limited to linear, transactional chatbot interactions?
Chau and his co-founders "we were having a lot of fun experimenting with AI," he tells me. "But the more we built, the more we saw fundamental limitations in chatbots."
This insight sparked the creation of Cove: a flexible, visual workspace designed to match the natural ways humans think and work together, with AI as an active partner in the process.
I was reminded of Flora, a creative operating system that contains a beautiful and fluid setup for ideation. It mimics a designer's sketchbook or filmmaker's storyboard. Cove, in contrast, is for thought clarity -- more architectural, but still beautiful and clean, and focused on sharpening what's been built and creating insight along the way.
I dug into Cove's functionality and, more importantly, why it matters right now in a rapidly evolving age of AI.
What is Cove, and how does it use AI?
Cove's best feature, and one it has in common with many AI tools, is that it responds and adapts in real time. Chau shared that Cove pulls from a mix of top AI models -- OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Perplexity -- without requiring you to choose or toggle between them. The goal is for it to feel less like software and more like inviting a collaborator into your thought process.
The way Cove works is simple: You tell it what you're working on, and instead of a single thread or linear chat, Cove opens into a canvas, one that shapes itself around whatever you're trying to figure out.
As Chau described it, Cove creates a flexible workspace for you, filled with cards that break your project into manageable pieces.
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Cove / Screenshot by CNET
"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
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A Cove workspace I made about a Yosemite camping trip, featuring an AI-generated image, a map, a website and AI-generated text with itineraries and tips on stargazing.
Cove/Screenshot by CNET
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.
Head to Cove.ai and click Get Started to sign up with Google or by creating an account. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.) 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. 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.