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Description
AI reading assistant: summarise, chat & explain PDFs, articles, YouTube, Gmail & more, with citations that highlight the source. Sidenote is an AI reading assistant that lives in Chrome's side panel and answers questions about whatever you're reading: a PDF, a web article, a YouTube video, an email in Gmail or Outlook, or a document in a connected account. Every answer carries numbered citations, and clicking one scrolls the page to the exact source passage and highlights it, so you can check any claim in one click instead of taking the AI's word for it. Stop skim-reading and stop second-guessing AI answers. Open the side panel on any document and Sidenote will summarise it at the length you choose, chat with it, explain the hard parts at the reading level you pick, and build a glossary of its jargon. Whatever it tells you, it shows you where it came from. HOW IT WORKS 1. Open the side panel with the toolbar icon or Ctrl+Shift+S (Cmd+Shift+S on Mac). 2. Start from Home, which shows the page, PDF, video or email on screen. Press Summarise or Ask about it and Sidenote saves it to your library and opens its tools. A page you saved before opens straight into them. 3. Switch between the labelled tools across the top of the document: Summarise, Chat, Explain, Glossary and Notes. Every answer arrives with citation chips: click one and the source passage lights up on the page. 4. Move around with the bar at the bottom of every screen: Home, Library, Collections and Add. READS THE DOCUMENTS YOU ALREADY USE • Open it on a PDF to read research papers, journal articles, reports, contracts and manuals. Works in the browser's built-in PDF viewer and in Sidenote's own viewer, with page-accurate citations either way. • Read scanned PDFs on a paid plan: built-in OCR turns a scanned contract, an old paper or a photographed handout into searchable, summarisable text whose citations still land on the right spot on the page. • Read PDFs a site shows inside its own in-page viewer, the kind that never gets its own web address, and PDFs behind a sign-in, which load through your existing browser session. • Summarise any web page or long article: news, documentation, blog posts and help centres. Sidenote extracts the readable article and works from that. • Open a YouTube video and work from its transcript instead of scrubbing through it. Summarise the video, ask questions about it and build a glossary, with every citation carrying a timestamp: click a chip and the player seeks to the exact moment. • Summarise a Gmail thread where it sits, and read the documents attached to it without downloading them first. A message carrying several files lets you pick one, each attachment keeps its own entry in your library, and a saved attachment links back to the email it came from. • Do the same in Outlook: open a message on Outlook.com or a work or school account and read both the message and its attachments through your Microsoft connection. • Open a file stored in Google Drive and read it in place, whether you open it in its own tab or preview it from the file list. Files shared with you work the same way, and pasting a Drive link brings in a file you haven't opened yet. • Ask questions about a Google Doc: read-only, captured with Google's own typesetting so columns, fonts and drawings match the document exactly, and cited to the exact passage. Documents with multiple tabs ingest every tab. • Read your team's Confluence wiki straight from the browser with no admin install, or index a whole space at once and ask questions across all of it (space indexing on Pro+ and above). • Chat with the Notion pages you connect, and summarise them in a click. • Work with Word files and slide decks stored in Microsoft SharePoint or OneDrive, read through your Microsoft connection. • Bring in a Slack canvas your team is working from. • Read any public article or PDF by pasting its link, even when the page you're on isn't one Sidenote can open directly. • Upload your own files too. On paid plans, Word documents and PowerPoint decks render as true print-quality pages, so what you cite is what the document actually looks like. WHAT IT DOES • Summarise with citations: a standard summary on every plan, plus TL;DR bullets and a detailed read of the whole document on paid plans. Every key point carries a numbered chip that scrolls to its source, and your first document summarises itself so you see the product working immediately. • Chat with citations: ask anything about the document and watch the answer stream in. Click a citation chip and the page jumps to the highlighted passage, and a cited-passage card in the panel shows the exact quote, a Show on page button and one-click save to notes. • Check any citation: the citation inspector shows whether the quote was found word for word or matched to a related passage, and lets you jump to each candidate. If it picked the wrong spot, confirm the right passage and the correction is saved for your account and that version of the document. • Pick up where you left off: Home lists your recent reading, and a saved document's Reading history offers to resume at your page, with a trail of the citations you visited. Keep that history on this device, sync it to your account, or clear it. • Ask follow-ups faster: suggested follow-up questions appear under each answer, one tap each. • Explain simply: select a dense passage and have it rewritten at the reading level you choose, from everyday words a 12-year-old would follow to a layperson's version that keeps the technical terms and defines them, without losing accuracy. • Build a glossary: jargon, acronyms and proper nouns defined from the passages where they appear, each definition cited back to its context. • Listen instead of reading: summaries, chat answers and explanations can be read aloud. • Save highlights as notes: right-click any quote to keep it with your own comment and a jump back to its exact spot, then search your notes across quotes and comments alike. • Find in the document: search inside the open document and jump to every occurrence with the same scroll-and-highlight as a citation. Nearby repeats share one row, so the match count means distinct places in the document. • Search your library by meaning: find saved documents by what they say, not just their titles, with stars, tags and filters to keep a growing library organised. • Ask your whole library: type a question into the search box on Home and get an answer from everything you've saved. Each citation names the document it came from and opens it (Pro and above). • Collections: group documents from different tools into one workspace and ask a single question across all of them; the answer cites which document said what. In the web dashboard, turn a collection into a verified research report with click-to-highlight citations, or an answer grid that puts up to 8 questions to every document at once (paid plans). • Share what you found: send a summary, a chat thread, a single answer or a glossary as a link that shows a frozen snapshot, then see each link's views and revoke it from the dashboard. • Answer in your language: summaries, chat, explanations and glossaries in any of 17 languages, while quoted passages stay in their original wording so citations still match the document. • Right-click anywhere: Explain selection, Ask about it, Save highlight, or Summarise this page, straight from the context menu. • Export everything: summaries, chat threads and glossaries as Markdown or CSV, or one combined export pack per document, delivered through the browser's download manager. • Know where you stand: usage meters on Chat and Summarise show how much of your weekly or monthly allowance is left, and progress bars estimate how long a build will take. WHY SIDENOTE IS DIFFERENT • Citation-first by design: the model is required to cite the passages it used, and the server checks every quoted citation against the document before you see it. A claim the source does not support loses its citation, and if the document doesn't answer your question, Sidenote says so plainly. No silent hallucinations. • Citations that actually land: the highlighter opens collapsed sections to reach a passage, sees through modern web-component pages, survives pages that change after you save them, and waits to confirm the passage is really on screen before calling it done. On YouTube the citation is a timestamp; in a PDF it is the exact sentence on the exact page. • One assistant across every tool: most AI add-ons are locked to a single platform and sold per seat. Sidenote reads your PDFs, your email, your wikis and your cloud documents from one place, for one subscription. PRIVATE BY DESIGN • We never train AI models on your documents. • No ads, and no analytics inside the extension or on your signed-in dashboard. • Data is stored in a UK region and encrypted at rest. Connected accounts are read-only, and disconnecting one deletes its tokens immediately. • You choose retention per document: keep it to re-open later, or have it deleted within 24 hours. • Delete your account and every stored document yourself, any time, from the dashboard. • Sign in with an emailed magic link or one-time code, or with Google or GitHub. There is no Sidenote password to remember or leak. WHAT'S NEW IN 5.4 • Start from Home: a redesigned side panel puts the page you're on, a search box that also asks your library, your recent reading and your collections on one screen. • Get around faster: a bar at the bottom of every screen moves between Home, Library, Collections and Add, and every other screen has a back button. • Come back to saved pages: a page you saved before opens straight into its tools, and Update from this page refreshes the stored copy when the page changes. • Find every tool by name: labelled tools sit across the top of each document, and every document action lives in one menu. • Add documents from one place: upload a file, paste a link or connect an app from the Add screen. • Copy any citation: Copy citation on a citation chip or a cited-passage card copies the quoted passage with its source. COMMON QUESTIONS Q: Does it work on scanned PDFs and photocopies? A: Yes, on paid plans. OCR turns a scanned contract, an old paper or a photographed handout into searchable text, and its citations still point at the right place on the page. Q: Do the citations really point at the source? A: Yes, and they are checked. The server verifies every quoted citation against the document before you see it, a claim the source does not support loses its citation, and clicking a chip scrolls to and highlights the passage on the page. If nothing in the document answers your question, Sidenote tells you that instead of guessing. Q: Is there a free plan? A: Yes. The free plan has no time limit and needs no card. It includes, each week, 2 documents, 6 standard summaries, 6 explanations, 1 glossary build and 10 cited chat turns. Paid plans from £10/month raise the limits and unlock collections, OCR and print-quality uploads. Q: Will my documents be used to train an AI model? A: No, never. Your data is stored encrypted in a UK region, connected accounts are read-only, and you can delete individual documents or your whole account yourself at any time. Q: Does it work on documents behind a sign-in? A: Yes, for pages and PDFs you can already open in your browser. Sidenote reads them through your existing session, and nothing is captured until you explicitly load a document with the panel open. Q: What languages can it answer in? A: Any of 17 languages. Pick yours and summaries, chat, explanations and glossaries arrive in it, while quoted passages stay in the original language so citations still match the document. Q: Does it work outside Chrome? A: Yes. The same extension is available for Microsoft Edge and Firefox, and the web dashboard at getsidenote.app keeps your library, notes and collections in sync through your account. GET MORE FROM SIDENOTE • Reopen the panel and it returns to the tool you used last on this device. • Pause Sidenote on sites you never want it to read, per site. • Select several library documents at once to tag, export or delete them together. • Open Settings from the gear on Home to choose a light, dark or system theme, turn on Reduce effects for a calmer panel, and drive the whole panel from the keyboard. TRY IT BEFORE YOU SIGN IN Press Try the demo on the sign-in screen and a guided demo runs on a sample document before you create an account: a cited summary, scripted questions and a glossary, with real click-to-highlight citations. When you sign in, everything you save syncs to a full web dashboard at getsidenote.app with the same viewer, citations, collections, sharing and exports. PRICING • Free, with no time limit and no card required: each week, 2 documents, 6 standard summaries, 6 explanations, 1 glossary build and 10 cited chat turns. • Pro, £10/month: higher monthly limits, all three summary lengths, Ask your library, multi-document collections, OCR for scanned PDFs and print-quality Word and PowerPoint uploads. • Pro+ and Pro Max: our most capable model for chat, Confluence space indexing, larger collections and bigger uploads. • Team plans bill per seat, with shared collections for your organisation. Full limits: https://getsidenote.app/pricing QUESTIONS OR FEEDBACK We read everything: support@getsidenote.app Privacy policy: https://getsidenote.app/privacy Terms: https://getsidenote.app/terms Learn more: https://getsidenote.app