The Recitare Guide

Recitare helps you understand what you read and remember what you learn. You add your readings, work through the hard parts, and Recitare files their ideas in your Recitare Brain, where they link up across subjects and come back for review. Here is the loop, start to finish.

1. 1Create a free account. No card needed.
2. 2Add a source: a PDF, your slides, your notes, a YouTube lecture or a photo of a page.
3. 3Open it to read or listen, and have any hard sentence, figure or table explained where it is.
4. 4Explore your Recitare Brain, ask questions of everything you have added, take a short review, and tell back what you remember.

Where to find it: After you sign in, Home shows what you were last reading, your Spaces and your newest sources.

Add a source once. Recitare reads it, picks out its main ideas and adds them to your Recitare Brain while you get on with your day.

1. 1Upload a document: PDF, Word, PowerPoint, plain text, or an image such as a photo of a page, which is read with OCR.
2. 2Paste a YouTube link: Recitare saves the video's transcript, so a video needs one to be added.
3. 3Paste a Wikipedia link: the article's text is saved with credit to Wikipedia. Other websites cannot be added by link yet.
4. 4Choose from your library: add something you already have to another Space.
5. 5Put it in a Space: a Space keeps the sources for a course, a project or a curiosity together.

Where to find it: The + Add a source button is at the top of every page in the app.

Open any source to work through the original in the way that suits you.

1. 1Read it yourself, or press play and listen as each word lights up while it is spoken. Choose from six voices in American, British and Australian accents, and set the speed that suits the passage.
2. 2Switch between two views of a PDF: Flow State, the text reflowed for reading and listening, and Document, the original pages as they were typeset. Your place carries over.
3. 3When a sentence will not give, select it and choose Explain this for a plain-English explanation, right where it is.
4. 4Make a summary or a study guide in a click. Study guides come in five formats on paid plans, with Key Concepts on Free, and turn into flashcards you can review in the app or send to Anki.
5. 5On Scholar and Researcher, an Audio Overview has two voices talk your document through.

Where to find it: The playback bar is at the bottom once a source is open. Summary, Study guide and Podcast are in Study tools at the top right, or Tools on a phone.

Figures and equations are where reading often stalls. In Flow State, figures and tables appear in place with an Explain button. In Document view, you can snip any part of the page and ask about it.

1. 1Tap Explain on a figure or table, or choose the snipping tool and drag a box around what you want explained.
2. 2Recitare captures the region at high resolution, so small labels and fine detail can be read.
3. 3The explanation opens in a side panel and can be read aloud. Copy it to your notes if you want to keep it.

Where to find it: Explain buttons appear on figures in Flow State; the snipping tool is in Document view.

Your Recitare Brain is the map of what you are learning. Recitare picks out the main ideas in each source, links ideas that mean the same thing across sources and subjects, and groups them into areas.

1. 1Open Brain to see your ideas as a map. Zoom in, or search for an idea or an area.
2. 2Open any idea to see the passage it came from and the ideas it connects to.
3. 3Where two sources explain the same idea, the idea shows both. If Recitare has linked two ideas that are not the same, you can tell it so.

Where to find it: Brain is in the top bar of the app.

Ask a question and the answer comes from the sources you added, not the open web, with the passages it rests on so you can check them.

1. 1Ask across everything you have learned from the Ask box on the Brain page.
2. 2Ask about one source while it is open: answers cite the page they come from.
3. 3On Researcher, ask while listening without losing your place, and let Study Mode check your understanding with a question every few paragraphs.

Where to find it: The Ask box is on the Brain page; inside a source, use Ask Max above the document or Ask in the bottom bar on a phone.

Reading once is rarely enough to keep it. A short review brings a few of your ideas back, one at a time, so they are still there when you need them.

1. 1Start a review from Home. It takes about five minutes.
2. 2Recitare chooses a few ideas from your Recitare Brain and asks about each in turn.
3. 3The day after you spend a while with a source, Recitare may send one short email to bring you back to where you stopped. It is at most one a day, and each email has a one-click unsubscribe.

Where to find it: The Review button is on Home once your Recitare Brain has enough ideas.

Recalling what you read, before looking again, is one of the best-studied ways to make it stick. Tell it back gives you a blank page for it.

1. 1Choose a subject or a source, and write or say everything you remember about it.
2. 2Say how sure you are of what you wrote.
3. 3Recitare marks what you said against your own sources: what you got, what was partly there, and what you missed. There is no score.
4. 4Go over what you missed one idea at a time, in your own words, with a note back from your sources.
5. 5Defend your own work: tell back the argument of your own writing, kept apart from what you have read, as you would to an examiner.

Where to find it: Tell it back is in the top bar of the app.

There is nothing to download from an app store. Recitare is a progressive web app (PWA): a website your phone can add to its home screen, where it gets its own icon and opens full screen like any other app. It is the same account as on your computer, so everything you have added is already there.

1. 1On an iPhone: open recitare.app in Safari, tap the Share button, then Add to Home Screen, then Add.
2. 2On Android: open recitare.app in Chrome, tap the menu (the three dots), then Add to Home screen or Install app.
3. 3Open Recitare from the new icon and sign in once. When you are signed in on a phone, the Home page also offers to add the icon for you.
4. 4Use it as you would on your computer: add a reading or a snapshot of a page, listen with the screen locked, ask a question, or tell back what you remember.

Where to find it: Any recent phone browser, with the same login as your computer.

Your sources are yours. Here is what happens to them.

1. 1Sources are stored encrypted, in transit and at rest, so your library, your Recitare Brain and audio replay work.
2. 2Personal details are removed before your text is sent for AI analysis (questions, summaries, study guides, your Recitare Brain). Listening audio is spoken as written, under our providers' no-training terms.
3. 3Our AI providers’ terms prohibit training on the content you submit.
4. 4Delete a source, or your whole account, whenever you like. Deletions can be undone for 30 days, then the data is permanently removed.

Where to find it: Full details are on the Trust page and in the Privacy Policy; account deletion is in Account.

Start free and upgrade only if you need more listening, more sources a day or the full set of study tools. Your Recitare Brain, short reviews and Tell it back are on every plan.

1. 1Free ($0): 20,000 words of listening to start, then 1,000 a week; 5 sources a day added to your Recitare Brain; a daily allowance of summaries and Key Concepts study guides.
2. 2Scholar ($9/mo): 100,000 words a month, 30 sources a day, all five study guide formats and Audio Overviews. Recommended for most readers.
3. 3Researcher ($18/mo): 300,000 words a month with the highest-quality voice, 60 sources a day, plus Snap-to-Explain, Study Mode and asking while listening.

Where to find it: Compare everything on the Pricing page; manage or cancel from your Account.

Stuck, or have an idea? We read what you send, and during early access your feedback shapes what we build next.

1. 1Lost your way? What can Recitare do? at the bottom of every page in the app shows every feature, where it is, and takes you there. It is also where you switch the daily greeting back on.
2. 2Use the Feedback button inside the app to send us a note directly.
3. 3Email support@recitare.app for account or billing questions.
4. 4Browse the Support page for quick answers to common questions.

Where to find it: The Feedback button is within reach on every page of the app.