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Mistral OCR and Notion MCP Servers to Consolidate Notes

Flowchart

A word About Power of Note-taking

One of the worst feelings I can think of, is to have had a wonderful moment or insight or vision or phrase, to know you had it, then lose it.

These words from Anne Lamott resonate deeply with me, and they highlight just how frustrating it can be to let these precious thoughts slip away. That's why I take notes. I jot down everything and anything to capture the essence of what's on my mind, or in other's minds, in case of meeting.

While there are plenty of automatic note-taking tools for meetings these days, I prefer to use my own words and my own style. In fact, research shows the mnemonic power of notes — especially when done with a pen. So whether it's meaningful or mundane, I keep the habit alive: I take notes, and lots of them.

My Challenge: Consolidating Notes

I use Notion and my Kindle Scribe to take notes. So, my notes often end up scattered between handwritten pages and digital entries stored directly in Notion. My goal was clear: I wanted all my notes consolidated in one place. Here's the process I developed:

  1. Gather my notes in a file — whether they're scanned, photographed, or digitally handwritten.
  2. Use an OCR tool to extract the text from those notes.
  3. Retrieve the extracted text and create a linked Notion page for each note.

Enter Mistral Document AI OCR and MCP Servers

OCR tools are getting better and better these days, which is a lifesaver when you have unique handwriting like mine 😅 or when you're scribbling in a hurry. Mistral Document AI OCR stands out in this realm. It allows you to upload documents and efficiently extracts their content with speed and quality, all while being budget-friendly ($1 / 1000 pages).

Mistral Document AI OCR To streamline this, I decided to create a small MCP Server that leverages Mistral Document AI to process my notes. You can check it out here: mistral-ocr-mcp on GitHub.

If you're unfamiliar with MCP servers, have a look at the official documentation. In a nutshell, an MCP Server augments your LLM (Large Language Model) by letting it interact with various tools through APIs.

My GitHub repo includes everything you need to set up the MCP server and start using it in your preferred client, like Claude Desktop or Cursor.

After adding the necessary configuration to your MCP client, you can ask questions like this:

Extract notes from this local file: /absolute/local_file_path.pdf Note Extraction

And voilà! The extracted text is ready to be used.

Next: Creating Notion Pages

The next step is to create a Notion page based on the extracted content, all within my client app (often Cursor, in my case). Conveniently, there's already an MCP Server for interacting with Notion's API. Let's use it!

Create the Notion integration

Follow these steps to create an integration specifically for the MCP server. You should then have at least one integration — called MCP in my case — configured with the appropriate permissions within your Workspace.

Notion MCP Integration

Set up the MCP Server

Then, you can copy your Integration secret (ntn****_), and use it in your MCP configuration in your client config file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "notionApi": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@notionhq/notion-mcp-server"],
      "env": {
        "OPENAPI_MCP_HEADERS": "{\"Authorization\": \"Bearer ntn_****\", \"Notion-Version\": \"2022-06-28\" }"
      }
    }
  }
}

Give access to your connection

The final step involves navigating to each page or database within Notion to grant authorization for the connection established by the MCP server.

Give Access to Connection This is really cool because it ensures your server only has access to pages with explicit connection set up.

Interact with your Notion pages

Now that you've completed that, get ready to dive back into your conversation with simple prompts like:

Create a Notion page in the test page Cursor MCP Tool Calls

And let the process run smoothly, step by step. You can see, approve or deny each step taken.

All In one Prompt

You obviously don't need to split the flow in the two steps (text extraction and then page creation), you can just directly put this prompt:

Create a notion page based on this local file: /absolute/local_file_path.pdf, in the Meeting notes database

Kindle to Notion Flow

A simple Procedure to Optimize Your Routine Tasks with MCP Servers

I'm always impressed by how effortlessly we can boost AI models with MCP server integrations. The entire procedure can be summarized in a few key steps:

MCP Decision Tree

• First and foremost, it is essential to clearly identify your specific requirements, your specifications.

• Next, it is important to dedicate sufficient time to thoughtfully design the solution flow, step by step, that will best meet those needs.

• Following that, you should conduct a search for a secure and official (or at least a trusted) MCP server that aligns with your objectives.

• Lastly, if you find that such a server does not exist, you can always take the initiative to write a simple lines of code that will allow you to interact with any API of your choosing.

Explore More

Want to see what's already out there? Check out some popular MCP servers here:

Want to read more on note-taking? Check these articles:

Want to learn more about Mistral Document AI solutions? Follow this link:

Enjoy!

PA,

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