Read
The whole document, marked up for the reason you are reading it
Highlighting by hand means deciding what matters before you know what the document says. Instead, say what you are reading it for — to get through it, to question it, to learn it, or to review it for its author — and the AI reads all of it, leaves notes in the margin beside the passages they are about, tells you which chapters can wait, and writes up what it found.
- Lenses
- Guide · Critique · Study — and Review
- Works on
- PDF · EPUB & Kindle · Word · Slides · notes
- Runs on
- macOS (Apple silicon) · Windows
- Price
- Free app · AI plans from $10/mo, or your own key
- AI
- Included, or your own API key
Know which chapters deserve your time before you read them
On a four-hundred-page book, the expensive mistake is reading the wrong two hundred pages closely.
- A pass opens with an assessment: what this document is, roughly how often it intends to stop, and which chapters it rates must-read, worth skimming, or safe to leave.
- Chapters it rates optional are skipped at first. Stay in one for a few seconds and it gets annotated after all — or ask for it from the chapter list.
- The chapter you are reading jumps the queue, so notes arrive where you are, not in page order. You read the finished chapters while the rest is still being worked through.
- Ask for the write-up at any point. It says how many chapters it is based on.
Same passage, four different readers
The same paper wants different treatment depending on why you are holding it. Choosing a lens is how a pass begins. Guide gives you conclusions, Critique and Study deliberately hand you the work, and Review — which has its own place in the AI menu — writes to the author.
The same passageIn a nine-month trial at one call centre, staff working from home handled 13% more calls. Remote work, we conclude, raises productivity.
One site, one kind of work. Calls handled is easy to count from home; the collaborative jobs this is later applied to are not.
The conclusion is about remote work in general; the evidence is one call centre. Narrow the claim or add sites.
This takes calls handled as the measure of productivity. If quality were counted instead, would the conclusion still follow?
Without looking back: what was measured, where, for how long — and what would you need before applying it to your own team?
Reviewing someone else’s draft? The notes are written to them
Ask a chat to review a paper and you get a memo. Then you go looking for the paragraph each complaint is about — and wonder whether it read that paragraph at all.
- Review has its own entry in the AI menu. Before it starts, say what to focus on, or pick a checklist or reviewer guidelines from your folder to review against.
- It files flaws, unsupported claims, alternatives the author never ruled out, unclear passages and strengths, each on the passage it is about, marked major or minor — and closes with a review memo for the author.
- Adopt the comments you agree with, in your own words, and export them from a Word, Markdown or text file as Word comments, in a copy beside the original.
It asks. You answer in the margin.
Critique and Study are training lenses: every note is a task, not a conclusion. Being told the answer is faster, and you would remember none of it.
- Critique questions the premises, the evidence, the reasoning and the stance, and marks the turning points where you should stop and write down your own verdict.
- Study turns the text into exercises — explain this concept in your own words, answer this without looking back, apply it to your own case, tell these two apart, check what you have understood so far.
- Each note has a Write my answer box. What you write is kept as your own comment, and the write-up at the end — an audit report or a study pack — reads your answers back.
- Self-test questions can go to the AI once you have answered: you go first, then it marks your answer against the text.
How the notes behave
Ordinary notes, yours to judge
They sit in the margin beside your own highlights. Adopt the ones worth keeping, ignore the ones you disagree with, and hide what you ignored.
Adopted notes become yours
Adopt opens a note with its wording in place for you to edit, then keeps it as your own comment — so running the pass again, or another lens, never takes it away from you.
It learns what you keep
What you adopted and ignored shapes the next run of the same lens: more of the kind you kept. Taste stays within a lens — what you want from a review is not what you want from a study pass.
Hand a note to the AI
Ask AI on any note takes it into a conversation with the passage already in hand. Questions you left in your own comments come back with the write-up, ready to send.
One chapter, another lens
Run a critique over just the methods section, or a study pass over the one chapter you have to learn. It sits alongside the pass you already have.
In your folder, not on a server
Passes, adopted notes and your answers are kept in the folder’s .mindmax directory, next to everything else MindMax stores there. They do not depend on an account.
Compared with asking a chat for a summary
| Topic | A summary from a chatPaste or upload, ask for the gist | In MindMax |
|---|---|---|
| What you get | A few paragraphs about the document | Notes on the passages themselves, plus a write-up at the end |
| Checking it | Find the passage yourself, if it exists | Each note sits on its passage and quotes it word for word |
| Disagreeing | Argue in the next message | Ignore the note; the next run of that lens takes it into account |
| Learning the material | You get the answer | Critique and Study ask, and you answer |
| One quick question | Faster — one message, seconds | A pass is minutes or more. For one question, ask instead |
| Cost | One message | In proportion to the length of the document |
Where it gets hard
- A full pass over a book is a real job, not a question
Working through four hundred pages costs credits in proportion. Try a lens on one document before committing a shelf to it, and run a single chapter when that is all you need.
- Sparse annotation is the design, not a failure
The bar is what a busy expert would actually stop for. If you were expecting a page glowing with highlights, this will read as underdone — the opening assessment says up front roughly how often it intends to stop, so you can judge it against that.
- It is only as good as the extracted text
A bad scan or a mangled multi-column layout produces notes anchored to mangled passages. Recognise scans first, and spot-check quotes from dense or unusual pages.
Common questions
Which lens should I pick?
Pick by what you need at the end. To get through a long document well, use the guide. To form your own judgement of an argument, use the critique. To learn the material, use the study lens. The guide gives you conclusions; critique and study ask and leave the answering to you. To judge a paper, manuscript or design document for its author — yours or someone else’s — start a review instead: its notes are written to the author and can be exported as Word comments.
Which files can it annotate?
PDFs, EPUB and Kindle books, Word documents, PowerPoint decks and your own Markdown notes. A scanned PDF needs its text recognised first.
Does it annotate automatically when I open a document?
No. A pass is always something you start, because working through a whole document is real AI work. Nothing happens silently in the background.
What happens to annotations when I run another pass?
Each lens keeps its own pass, so running the review leaves the guide pass you already have untouched — the panel switches between them. Re-running the same lens starts that one over; notes you adopted are your own comments by then, so they are kept either way.
Do I have to finish the document first?
No. You can ask for the write-up at any point, and it says which chapters it is based on — partial reading is the normal case rather than a degraded one.
Does annotating cost credits?
Reading, highlighting and writing your own comments never does. An AI pass does, in proportion to the length of the document — or, with your own API key, it is billed by your provider instead.
See also
The reading surface these passes run on, and where your own marks live.
The same passes at book scale, navigated by chapter.
Lay the argument out on a canvas beside the document as you go.
Why a note points at the words it rests on rather than asking for trust.
The half-hour version, where a pass is one step among several.
Review a colleague’s draft and send the comments back as a Word file.
The step-by-step guide: picking a lens, adopting and ignoring notes, asking for the write-up.