Chat with everything
Ask questions across a SILO, a hand-picked set of notes, or your whole library, with citations.
The Chat view is a step up from chatting about one note. You choose a scope, then ask questions across all of it, and answers cite the notes they came from.
Choosing a scope
Click the scope button at the top left for SILO Sam, All notes, any single SILO, or Select notes… to hand-pick.
SILO Sam
Sam is the default scope on both platforms and works differently from the rest: your library is never put into the prompt in one piece. Sam searches your notes on your device first and opens the few that fit, so the model sees a short list of matches (title, date, SILO and a few lines of preview) and the full text of the notes opened, and it has five tools: to search your notes, to list them by SILO and month, to read one in full, to look in this guide, and (when you have turned it on) to search the web. It uses at most ten tool calls per question, within a reading budget. Its searches forgive misspellings by checking them against the words you have actually written, and add everyday synonyms, so "car" also finds "van". The trace under each answer shows what it searched and read. Sam uses the full-text search already in your database, so there is nothing to build or install first.
On the phone, the Chat tab opens a SILO Sam session straight away. The buttons in the header start a new session, open the session history, and save the conversation as a note; the scopes button on the left lists everything else a chat can point at (All Notes, one SILO, or hand-picked notes). Long-press any message to copy or share it. A saved Sam conversation lands in the SILO Sam SILO, which you can rename, move notes out of, or delete like any other. The tone you pick stays with that session.
Long conversations look after themselves. Once a few exchanges have passed the most recent six (ten for a SILO or note chat), they are folded into a running summary in the background, after an answer, so you never wait for it; until then they are still sent word for word, so nothing falls in between. A quiet line in the chat shows where the summary begins. The transcript on screen stays complete; only what the model is sent is compacted. If summarising fails twice in a row, the oldest turns stop being sent and the line says so.
Sam reads text only. A note's photos, recordings and videos are not sent to it; asked what a photo shows, Sam says it cannot see it, cites the note, and points you to that note's own Chat, which can be sent images. A very long note is read as its opening plus the passages that match what Sam searched for, and the answer ends with a line saying which note was only partly read.
Hearing and speaking to Sam
Every answer has a speaker button that reads it aloud through the voice you use for notes (see Listening to your notes). Turn on Read answers aloud as they arrive (the toggle in the chat, or Settings ▸ Voice) and Sam speaks each sentence as soon as it is written, so the voice starts before the answer finishes. Headings, bullets, links and citation markers are left out of what is spoken, and the player's pause, speed and stop controls apply as they do for a note.
The microphone button in the composer dictates a question. The words land in the box for you to check and send. With Send chat dictation when I stop talking (Settings ▸ Speech to Text) on, the question goes out by itself after a moment of silence. On the phone the device's own speech recogniser is used when it has one, otherwise the recording goes to your speech server; on the desktop the on-device model transcribes it if you have downloaded one, otherwise your speech server does.
Full context
Every scope other than SILO Sam works in full context: every note in the scope is sent with every message. That suits a handful of notes and questions such as "compare these three". It needs no setup, but the prompt grows with the scope, so a whole SILO or your whole library can be more than your model can hold. For finding something in a large collection, ask SILO Sam, which searches first and reads only the few notes it needs.
Web search
Web search has three doors under Settings, AI Servers, Web search, and you choose one. My own SearXNG instance: the query goes only to a SearXNG server you run; it must have JSON output enabled (formats: [html, json] in its settings.yml), and public instances will not work because they disable that API or sit behind bot checks. My Brave Search API key: a key from brave.com/search/api; the query goes to Brave Search under your key, and Brave's own privacy terms say what it keeps. My model provider's search: OpenRouter only, no setup, and the query goes to the provider and its search partner. Switch on Enable web search in chat and use Test web search to confirm the door works.
With web search on, chat and SILO Sam can look up what your notes cannot hold, such as a current price for something you wrote down. Notes are always answered first; anything from the web appears under its own heading, "From the web, not your notes:", with a link to each page, and it is never mixed into what your notes say.
Sessions
Conversations are kept per scope. Session history reopens an old one and New session starts fresh. Everything is stored locally with your notes, and the Data screen shows how much space conversations use and lets you clear them.