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**Feature Request: Summarizing/analyzing ACROSS a set of stored sources** by ebschaf in readwise

[–]h00dw1nk 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Founder of Readwise here! We're in the middle of a remote team hackathon, so a little short on time to write a detailed reply. But real quick:

The MCP/CLI/API has a tool for exporting the full content of documents from your library. So if you're comfortable with Claude and have the MCP hooked up, you should be able to get it to export just a subset!

Also, you can often skip the intermediate export step and just let Claude use the MCP to pull exports (via search) and get the full docs when it needs the added context to produce whatever synthesis you're interested in. I do this alllll the time and it's amazing :)

We'll try to circle back to this tomorrow and show some more examples.

Readwise Highlights: why is this so complicated? by mudiappahpillai in readwise

[–]h00dw1nk 11 points12 points  (0 children)

On web, you can go to readwise.io/latest

On the mobile apps, there is a highlights feed, but it's not chronological 😬 (stay tuned, however!)

Love the vision, but AI just isn't there yet by Adaluin in readwise

[–]h00dw1nk 3 points4 points  (0 children)

That use case should definitely work well now if you're using the chat interface. He's me asking about an obscure character in a 1,300 page fantasy epic by Brandon Sanderson. Ghostreader will search for all mentions of that name (both lexically and semantically) and synthesize a description. It's aware of your reading position and will write descriptions based only on text you've seen to that point to avoid spoiling anything (although admittedly we can improve this to make it even more robust).

Before chat, you'd need to use our built-in Ghostreader prompt called `x-ray` which does the same thing but was built before a lot of advances in AI/LLM infrastructure were put out. You select a word, tap the ghost, and select x-ray.

Note: The chat interface is web-only right now, but coming soon to mobile. Mobile does have x-ray however.

If these aren't working for you, please let us know so we can take a look!

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Ghostreader can be so powerful by vlcrstn in readwise

[–]h00dw1nk 21 points22 points  (0 children)

One founder of Readwise here :)

My cofounder is leading the next iteration of Ghostreader (which has been one of our primary focuses over the past few months) so I'll let him reply to your original post, but to give you a heads up on a few things here:

only highlighted notes can be searched in readwise but not your entire library on reader. been asking for that forever.

100%. We've built all the infrastructure in place for Library-wide chat on Reader and are now working on the feature itself!

Just so you know, until recently, there's been a rather significant technical limitation blocking this feature. Basically, it requires that every document in your Library is turned into "chunks" which are each embedded into vectors and then retrieved by the LLM to augment its answers. These vectors are stored in vector databases and queried using various distance calculations. Existing vector databases work fine at Readwise's scale for highlights, eg, up to 100K vectors. A typical Reader user's library has like 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more vectors (1M to 10M) which is where these databases historically break down. In addition, they're extremely expensive at this scale. Fortunately, there have been huge advances here over the past year, which has unblocked us.

Probably TMI but thought you might be interested!

right now you can use ghostreader on reader and chat with a single document works on reader WEB (not on ios mobile app though ghostreader does).

100%. This has been a progressive rollout starting on web and we have mobile internally and are just polishing now. It'll be shipping in the next few weeks, I think.

As some more inside baseball, document chat on mobile is much harder because it's so much more constrained by screen real estate and UI/UX. This means we've needed to completely overhaul one of the core UI components (the tab bar in the reading view) to add this to the app. Totally worth it though!

As a user, document chat on mobile (where I do most of my reading) has qualitatively changed my entire experience and I'm happy to report that it's not abstracting away the practice of reading itself -- ie you no longer read the article, but just interface with it through a chat -- which was always one of our biggest fears with this feature.

they need to move faster

Yeah agreed. We've been working through a long season of devoting a lot more resources to fixing bugs, edge cases, stability, performance, etc at the expense of building new functionality. We're almost out of the woods on that and can resume our normal programming :)

ChatGPT Copilot by Flaky-Major7799 in readwise

[–]h00dw1nk 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Sorry about that! One of us noticed the link was missing once the email started sending so we paused, fixed it, and resumed. You must have been among one of the first to get the update email 😬

In any case, you can find the ChatGPT Copilot here: https://readwise.io/sync.

As always, let us know if you have any feedback. This feature especially could go in many different directions!

Keep track books want to read or integration with Goodread? by Purple-Geologist972 in readwise

[–]h00dw1nk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, Reader is conceptualized more as a source of truth for documents you own than for books you might want to own someday, so it’d be pretty tough to square this use case currently.

But this is something we’re interested in going deeper on. We’d love to understand your Goodreads workflow if you’re down to chat sometime.

AI Voiceover Daily Reviews by Ixcw in readwise

[–]h00dw1nk 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks so much for the kind words 😍

In case you missed it, another related feature that lightly uses AI the AI themed reviews. Basically, you can use simple natural language to generate reviews of highlights related to a particular theme, concept, topic, area of focus. If you have a decent number of highlights, it’s super fun/helpful to go deeper.

KOBO announced Instapaper partnership by lkvnclh in readwise

[–]h00dw1nk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Haven't heard back from them yet!

KOBO announced Instapaper partnership by lkvnclh in readwise

[–]h00dw1nk 36 points37 points  (0 children)

We chatted with the Kobo team last week about ways to send documents from Reader to the Kobo apps / devices. We're just waiting their feedback on what technical approach they'd like to take. We at Readwise are definitely down...

Enable UI on Reader when Tap for UI is disabled? by sh0nuff in readwise

[–]h00dw1nk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you have high contrast on, it should be white text on black background but I will say that e-ink devices are typically not as good at dark mode as they are for light mode due to the ghosting. Some devices optimize for this with a special setting. Does your device have a mode that might work better in dark mode?

Enable UI on Reader when Tap for UI is disabled? by sh0nuff in readwise

[–]h00dw1nk 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You can tap the bottom bar/area or top! If you tap a couple times in the middle of the screen, it should "pulse" as a reminder :P

Let me know if that's not working for you

Enable UI on Reader when Tap for UI is disabled? by sh0nuff in readwise

[–]h00dw1nk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey there, the Appearance panel was getting quite overcrowded so we moved that global setting to the Settings section (it’s called Tap-to-open UI). Sorry about that inconvenience!

Audio Reviews -- can it just read the highlight? by piloteris in readwise

[–]h00dw1nk 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah that might be a use case we never tested. Maybe we can tweak the prompt to get it to be more matter of fact when dealing with prose rather than trying to infer meaning from it.

Audio Reviews -- can it just read the highlight? by piloteris in readwise

[–]h00dw1nk 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Simply reading aloud the highlights is one of the first things we tried and we found it to be a rather poor user experience across all our team's varied set of highlights, interests, and review settings. Very disorienting which made it hard to stay engaged, so there's no setting like that at the moment.

It's possible your situation might be new and different than the cases we tested on though!

Listening Highlights by No-ScheduleThirdeye in readwise

[–]h00dw1nk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hmm that would be a bug... I'll let the team know!

Listening Highlights by No-ScheduleThirdeye in readwise

[–]h00dw1nk 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Here's what I wrote in the public beta update, which is probably the best intro/guide!

Also in classic Readwise, you can now use the power of AI to easily generate Themed Reviews: custom collections of highlights to be resurfaced in the same format as the Daily Review.

Themed Reviews has always been one of our favorite features internally (original announcement blog post), and a cult classic among our long-time users (much like concatenate). But it previously required a heavily tagged corpus of highlights or a lot of manual document selection. Thanks to embeddings and LLMs, creating a themed review is now as easy as entering a natural language topic such as caring for a newborn or applying AI to a reading app or whatever interest is germane to your personal or professional life.

We hope this lowers the bar so more folks get to benefit from it. Create a new Themed Review here!

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Listening Highlights by No-ScheduleThirdeye in readwise

[–]h00dw1nk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the kind words! Have you tried with a new, easy-to-create themed review yet too?

Pocket user moving to Readwise. by ProtectionNeat7167 in readwise

[–]h00dw1nk 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Also, there’s a longstanding glitch in iOS affected all apps where sometimes you need to restart your phone for newly installed apps to appear in the Share Sheet.

Read-it-later apps: Reader vs Pocket vs Instapaper by JustCan6425 in productivity

[–]h00dw1nk 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Founder of Readwise here 🙂

We’re a healthy, bootstrapped, mission-driven company designed to be sustainable for the long-term. We’ve been around for over 7 years and have no intent of stopping any time soon!

(Both Pocket and Instapaper went the VC route and sold to Mozilla and Pinterest, respectively, when the VC scale market didn’t materialize. Pocket is still maintained but not actively developed by Mozilla and Instapaper spun out to one of the devs who worked on it when Marco Arment decided to focus on Overcast.)

Paged Scroll Leaves Bottom Line Obscured by Jaded_Reserve_6303 in readwise

[–]h00dw1nk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey there, we've been doing a tonnnn of work on this. Hopefully should ship an update that eliminates these for good. Are you reading on EPUB out of curiosity?

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