Having a document annotated by AI

A reading pass is the AI working through a whole document for a reason you choose, leaving notes beside the passages they are about, and ending with a write-up. It is something you start — nothing is annotated automatically when you open a file.

Before you start

A document open in its reader: a PDF, an EPUB or Kindle book, a Word document, a PowerPoint deck or one of your own Markdown notes. A scanned PDF has to be recognised first, or there is nothing for the notes to quote.

Step 1: pick a lens

Open the AI menu in the reader's toolbar and choose a lens under Read. To review a document for its author, choose Review this document… under Review instead — see reviewing someone else's document.

The reader's AI menu, from an earlier version. Review now has a group of its own, below Read.

Lens	Pick it to	Notes are	Ends with
AI Guide	Get through a long document well	Key passages, what to skim, connections, doubts worth raising	Closing synthesis
AI Review	Judge a paper, manuscript or design document, for its author	Flaws, unsupported claims, alternatives, ambiguities and strengths, each major or minor	Review memo
AI Critique	Form your own judgement of an argument	Questions about premises, evidence, reasoning and stance — for you to answer	Audit report
AI Study	Learn the material	Exercises: explain it, recall it, apply it, tell two things apart	Study pack

The first three are under Read; AI Review is started from Review, with a focus you can set first. Guide and Review give you conclusions. Critique and Study deliberately hand you the work instead. Review writes its notes to the author, and the ones you keep can be sent back as Word comments.

Step 2: read the opening assessment

A pass opens with an assessment: what the document is, roughly how often it intends to stop, and which chapters it rates must-read, worth skimming, or safe to leave.

Chapters rated optional are skipped at first. Stay in one for a few seconds and it gets annotated anyway, or ask for it from the chapter list with Annotate this chapter now.

Step 3: read while it works

The chapter you are reading jumps the queue, so notes arrive where you are rather than in page order. Progress shows in the toolbar. You can stop at any time and keep what has been done.

A guide pass on an ebook: a margin note, the chapter ledger and the closing synthesis.

• Key / All switches between only the key and skim marks, and every note type.
• Previous / next annotation steps through the notes without scrolling.
• Adopt a note you want to keep. It opens with the AI's wording in place for you to edit, then becomes your own comment, so it survives any re-run.
• Ignore one you disagree with, and hide what you ignored. What you adopt and ignore shapes the next run of the same lens.
• Ask AI on a note takes it into a conversation with the passage already in hand.

Answering in the margin

On Critique and Study notes, use Write my answer. What you write is kept as your own comment, and the write-up at the end reads your answers back. For self-test questions, write your answer first and then let the AI mark it against the text.

A note that asks rather than tells — your answer is kept and read back at the end.

Step 4: ask for the write-up

You do not have to wait for the last chapter. Ask for the write-up at any point; it says how many chapters it is based on. Partial reading is the normal case, not a degraded one.

Running another lens

Each lens keeps its own pass. Running a review leaves the guide pass you already have untouched; the panel switches between Reading notes and Review. Re-running the same lens starts that one over — notes you adopted are your own comments by then, so they are kept either way. You can also run a reading lens over a single chapter.

Reviewing someone else's document

A review is for a draft someone is waiting to hear back on: a colleague's proposal, a student's chapter, a manuscript you are refereeing.

1. Start it. Open the document and choose AI → Review this document….
2. Say what the review is for. In AI review settings, write a Review focus in a line ("check the cost estimate and the rollout risks; ignore wording"), pick a Review criteria document from your knowledge base — reviewer guidelines, a checklist, a call for proposals — or leave both empty and let the AI choose. The focus decides where the notes go; a serious problem outside it is still raised. The criteria document itself is never annotated. Then Start review.

AI review settings. On a document that already has a review, the button reads Review again and the new review replaces the old one.

3. Work through the notes. Each one is written to the author and marked Major or Minor (strengths have no severity). Adopt the ones you agree with, edited into your own words; Ignore the rest; select any passage to add a comment of your own.
4. Read the review memo. It covers the overall assessment, major and minor issues, strengths and the questions the author should answer, plus a few things worth checking yourself before you send it.
5. Export the reviewed copy. Click Export reviewed Word copy in the review panel, or use the ⋯ menu in the Comments panel. Tick the comments to include, and choose whether to add the review memo as an overall comment at the top and to prefix comments with [Major], [Minor] or [Strength].

A review on a Word file: a Major note with Adopt, and the Review tab with the export button.

MindMax saves <name> - reviewed.docx in the same folder. The original file is not changed and any comments already in it are kept. Your comments are signed with the Revision author set in Settings, and the labels follow the document's language. Only what you adopted or wrote is exported — the AI's other notes and your conversations with it are not.

A few things to know:

• The reviewed copy can be made from Word (.docx), Markdown and plain-text files. A Markdown or text draft is turned into a Word document first. PDFs, ebooks and PowerPoint files can be reviewed in MindMax but not exported this way.
• A comment whose words cannot be found reliably in the file — text that appears more than once, or a quote too short to place — is listed with the reason instead of being placed on a guess.
• The copy carries comments, not suggested rewrites as tracked changes. Comments other reviewers left in the Word file are kept but not read.
• A review sends the document's text to the model you use. Check your journal's or funder's rules before reviewing a confidential manuscript; a model running on your own computer keeps it on the machine.

What it costs

Reading, highlighting and writing your own comments never spend anything. A pass does, in proportion to the length of the document — or, on your own API key, it is billed by your provider. Try a lens on one document, or one chapter, before committing a shelf of books to it.

Where it is kept

Passes, adopted notes and your answers are stored in the knowledge base's hidden .mindmax folder, next to your highlights and comments. The document itself is not modified.

What to expect

• Sparse is the design. The bar is what a busy expert would actually stop for. The opening assessment says roughly how often it plans to stop, so you can judge it against that.
• It is only as good as the extracted text. A mangled multi-column page produces notes on mangled passages. Click through to the page when a quote reads oddly.
• Every note quotes its passage word for word. A quote that does not match the text is sent back before you see it.

Next

• Reading and annotating
• AI document review — what the author gets back
• Thinking on the canvas — lay the book out as a mind map beside it
• Read a book and keep notes