Guide
Is there an AI that remembers what you have read, across books and not just one chat?
Every session with a general assistant starts at zero — you re-explain your background, and it re-explains what you already understood. Here is what a reader that keeps a learner model actually changes, and what it is not.
The most tiring thing about reading with an AI assistant is not the answers. It is the throat-clearing before them — establishing, again, what you already know, what you are reading for, and which explanations do not work on you. Tomorrow you will do it again.
Meanwhile the thing worth keeping is not the text you highlighted. It is the shape of your own understanding: what you grasped immediately, what you had to have explained three times, which analogy finally made it click. No app keeps that, so it evaporates.
People try to solve it with note systems, and mostly it does not take:
"Help, I'm stuck in note-taking hell. How do I get out?" — r/ObsidianMD
"Ask HN: How do you remember the best stuff from non-fiction books?" — Ask HN
A folder of clippings is not the answer, because the clippings were never the problem. Re-explaining yourself is.
What a learner model is
Not chat history. Not a summary of your books. A short, structured picture of how you read:
- Where your understanding actually sits in a subject, as evidenced by what you asked.
- What has confused you before, and what unstuck it.
- Which kinds of explanation land for you — worked example, analogy, formal statement, historical framing.
- What you tend to read for: argument structure, application, pleasure.
It is deliberately small. It is about you, not about your library. And it applies across books — which is where the compounding is. Book one is a reading app with AI in it. Book six is a reading app that already knows you skip the derivations and want the counterexample.
Why it is on a page you can open
Invisible memory is a problem in a way people underestimate: if you cannot see what it thinks it knows about you, you cannot correct it, and a wrong belief quietly steers every explanation afterwards.
So in Resage the model lives on one page you can read and edit at any time. Everything it has inferred is on it, in plain language.
Two rules keep it from turning into a junk drawer:
Things it is confident about persist. Evidence you asked about repeatedly, corrections you made, understanding you clearly demonstrated.
Guesses fade if they are not borne out. An inference from one ambiguous question does not become a permanent fact about you. If nothing supports it later, it decays.
That asymmetry is what stops a memory feature from slowly becoming a caricature of you.
What it changes in practice
Explanations start at the right altitude. No re-establishing your background, because it is already known.
Connections across books appear. The idea you met three books ago, under a different name, gets pointed at when it reappears.
Repeats are shorter. The second time you meet the same sticking point, it is treated as a return rather than a first encounter — including what worked last time.
Your own history is searchable. Search covers the text of a book and your past discussions in one query. Six weeks later, what you usually want back is the explanation, not the sentence.
What it is not
- Not a note-taking app. No highlight export, no Obsidian sync, no wiki. If you want a second brain full of clippings, this is not it.
- Not a summary archive. It does not store your books' contents as its memory; it stores a picture of you.
- Not training data. Your content is never used to train models. The learner model is yours, it stays with your account, and you can edit or clear it.
- Not a tutor. It reads level with you. It has no lesson plan and no opinion about your discipline.
- Not magic on day one. Day one is a reader with a grounded discussion layer, which is already useful. The compounding is a week-thirty argument, and we would rather say that than pretend otherwise.
Where your reading lives
Your files stay on your Mac and in your own iCloud. The whole file is never uploaded — only the few passages needed to answer a question are sent, and used only to answer it. Digest, text recognition and search run on-device.
The learner model itself is small text, stored with your account so it can follow you to the next device. You can open it, edit it, or clear it.
Where it stops
- macOS 14.0 or later on Apple Silicon. iPhone is next; no Windows, Android or web version.
- Discussion needs a connection. Reading, search, Digest and text recognition work offline.
- You bring your own files. No books are included. PDF, EPUB, Word, TXT, Markdown, and DRM-free Kindle files (MOBI, AZW3).
FAQ
How is this different from ChatGPT's memory?
Two things. What is kept here is specific to reading and learning — your understanding, your sticking points, which explanations work — rather than general facts about you. And it is anchored to books you actually read, so it is evidenced rather than asserted. A longer comparison: Resage vs ChatGPT.
Can I see and edit what it thinks it knows about me?
Yes. It lives on one page you can open at any time and edit. Facts it is confident about persist; guesses fade if they are not borne out.
Does the memory work across different books?
Yes, that is the point of it. What it learns about how you read carries from one book to the next.
Is my reading used to train models?
No. Your content is never used for training, and the whole file is never uploaded.
What does it cost?
Free to start, with a weekly discussion allowance. Importing, reading, Digest and text recognition are never metered. Resage Plus is $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year and raises the discussion allowance.