“I’ve spent forty years teaching people how to use tools to stay focused. This is the first one I can’t work without myself.”

Brian Friedlander, Ph.D., is one of the most established voices in assistive technology. He uses Scriben to protect his scarcest resource in client meetings — his attention.
Brian Friedlander, Ph.D. · Founder, AssistiveTek · Licensed Psychologist · Former Associate Professor, St. Elizabeth University

The short version

Brian Friedlander has reviewed nearly every note-taking tool on the market — digital pens, mind mapping, eInk devices, AI transcribers. Scriben is the one he doesn’t just recommend to clients. He loves it himself.

“What I’ve been teaching my clients to do — I finally do it myself.”
“For forty years I’ve taught students how to use tools to reduce cognitive load. The irony is that in my own consultations, I had never managed to do it for myself.”

Brian Friedlander, Ph.D., spends most of his week in conversations.
As an assistive technology consultant with over four decades of practice, a Penn-trained psychologist, and a licensed clinician in New Jersey, his calendar is a constant mix of school district evaluations, one-on-one student assessments, IEP meetings, teacher workshops, and product reviews with edtech companies.
Being fully present isn’t a soft skill for him — it’s the core of the work. Hearing the subtle frustration in a teacher’s voice, catching a parent’s hesitation before they say what they actually mean, picking up on the small cue from a student who isn’t sure how to ask for help. Brian’s ability to give the right recommendation rests entirely on whether those signals reached him.
Which is exactly why manual note-taking had become a contradiction he could no longer ignore.
“I’m often in back-to-back consulting sessions or IEP meetings. The moment I start writing down key points, I lose the visual and emotional cue of the person in front of me. By the time I look up, the real need may have been only half-expressed.”
For most professionals, multitasking is a minor inefficiency. For Brian — someone whose entire career has been about reducing cognitive load — it wasn’t acceptable to have that exact failure mode happening in his own meetings.

The split-attention trap

The problem isn’t note-taking itself. The problem is doing two cognitively demanding things at once: deep listening + manual capture.
Every consultation has moments that pivot on a single sentence — a parent describing a child’s unspoken struggle, a teacher mentioning a workaround they’ve been too embarrassed to share, a college student with executive function challenges saying “I just can’t get started.”
If you’re looking down when that moment happens, what you lose isn’t the information — it’s the emotional texture. And no amount of detailed notes will bring it back.
“What I needed wasn’t to stop taking notes. It was for my attention to be able to stay fully with the person across from me.”

Voice is where the meeting actually lives

Brian has reviewed nearly every note-taking tool on the market — digital pens, mind mapping, eInk devices, AI transcribers. As an expert in this space, he understands one thing better than most: the real density of a conversation isn’t in the few lines you manage to scribble down — it’s in everything that was actually said.
The tone, the pause, the hesitation, the exact wording — only full audio preserves any of that. Handwritten notes are lossy by definition: the harder you write, the more you miss.
Scriben inverts the model. With consent from everyone in the room, it captures the full audio of the conversation and, the moment the meeting ends, AI delivers structured notes. Brian doesn’t transcribe anything in real time. He occasionally jots a word or two as a thinking prompt — but that’s for cognition, not for record-keeping.

“This offloads the capture task entirely,” he says, “so my brain stays fully with the person across the table — whether that’s a student, a teacher, or a district administrator.”

A profession that takes consent seriously

Brian is emphatic that in educational settings — especially meetings involving minors, parents, and IEP processes — the ethical bar for recording is higher than in business contexts. That’s a boundary Scriben designs around.

“At the start of every meeting, I tell everyone in the room: I’ll be using Scriben to help with notes. If anyone is uncomfortable with that, we don’t record. Transparency, informed, consent — that’s non-negotiable. It’s also just the ethical baseline for anyone working in assistive technology.”

What Brian appreciates is how Scriben sits in the room:

“Put a phone or a dedicated recorder in front of a 12-year-old and the whole meeting changes. The kid tenses up. The parents get defensive. The teacher chooses her words too carefully. That defeats the entire purpose of an IEP meeting. Scriben doesn’t change the energy in the room — it just sits there quietly and does its job.”
From “capturing everything” to “seeing what matters”

Since integrating Scriben into his practice, Brian has noticed three shifts:
1.  Deeper consultations — He asks better follow-up questions because he never falls behind in listening.
2.  Faster follow-through — Action items identified during a meeting sync automatically to his task manager (like Todoist), eliminating the “what did I promise?” anxiety.
3.  Better modeling for clients — As an assistive technology expert, Brian now shows schools and students how AI note-taking can be a reasonable accommodation for ADHD, working memory challenges, or language barriers.

“For decades I trained people on mind mapping and digital pens. Now I show them that AI note-taking is the next layer — not to replace thinking, but to protect the space for thinking.”

The bottom line

Brian Friedlander has spent decades helping people work with their brains, not against them. For him, using Scriben isn’t about being more productive in the corporate sense. It’s about honoring the person right in front of you — and staying fully present when it matters most.

About Brian Friedlander, Ph.D.

Brian is the founder of AssistiveTek, a licensed psychologist in New Jersey, a Penn-trained Ph.D., and a former Associate Professor at St. Elizabeth University. He has spent over four decades at the intersection of psychology, education, and assistive technology.