Chat with your documents

Reader's new chat feature allows you to chat with documents as you're reading. This is currently a preview version that's only available in the web and desktop versions, but we plan to reciprocate the feature to mobile as we continue to develop it.

Chat with your document in Reader.

To access the chat, open up any document and click Chat in the right sidebar (or hit the backtick ` twice to cycle between the panels).

Open Chat from the right side panel.

The language model has access to the underlying document, its metadata, and your reading position, so it's more effective than other Ghostreader prompts at extracting detailed information, clarifying random questions that come up while reading, and applying the writer's concepts to domain-specific situations. The LLM also has access to the chat history, so you can more naturally ask follow up questions.

Since this is a preview version of the Chat feature, you might encounter use cases that need improvement. If you do, we'd love your feedback! Send us an email at hello@readwise.io.

Save chat responses

If you get a particularly useful or evocative response while chatting, you can save it to the document's note field. Not only will this separate the note out from the chat interface, it will also allow it to be synced to Readwise with the rest of the document's notes and highlights.

To save a response to the document note, click the notebook icon below the response.

Save chat response to the document note.

Additionally, you can use the Copy icon to save the response to your clipboard for use elsewhere.

Change the GPT model

By default, it uses OpenAI's 4o model for quick replies, but you can optionally use the more powerful o3 reasoning model if you're prefer to trade speed for intelligence.

To change the model, click into the dropdown menu at the bottom of the chat field.

Select the LLM model for your chat.

Clear the chat history

If at any point you'd like to start fresh with a new chat, you can click Clear chat at the bottom of the Chat panel. This will erase all of the current responses, so make sure you've copied or saved anything you might want to keep before you click this!

Clear your chat history.
Previous
Tips & Tricks

Have a suggestion?

We're pretty familiar with our product, so we occasionally fall victim to the Curse of Knowledge. If any part of this documentation confuses you or seems incomplete, please let us know!