Frequently asked questions
Here are answers to some of the most asked questions about Recall.
How is Recall different from other content summarization tools?
Recall has a full personal knowledge base where you can save your summaries. The summaries are automatically categorized and when you save a new summary, Recall finds relations with past content you have saved, helping you resurface information that you may have forgotten about. Recall also has features to help you revisit and learn from the summaries you have saved by using Spaced Repetition and Active Recall.
What types of online content can Recall summarize?
Recall can summarize any online content including the following:
▶️ YouTube videos
📰 Articles
📄 PDFs
📝 Blog posts
🎙️ Podcasts
📙Wikipedia pages
🍳 Recipes
Can I manually edit or add to a summary?
Yes, once you add a summary to your personal knowledge base, you can edit it to your liking using the rich text editor.
Where does Recall keep my data?
Recall is an offline-first PWA meaning that all your data is stored locally on your device using a web browser feature named IndexedDB. Your data is also backed up to our server so that it can be synced between your devices. It is backed up using a popular service called Firebase Realtime DB.
What is Active Recall?
Active recall is the practice of actively stimulating your memory during the learning process. Instead of passively reading or listening to information, you challenge your brain to retrieve and produce the information without looking at the source. With Recall, you can practise active recall by generating questions based on the summaries in your personal knowledge base. This will really test your knowledge and help the content stick.
What is Spaced Repetition?
Spaced repetition is a learning technique that involves reviewing information at increasing intervals over time. Instead of cramming all at once (which might help in the short term but falters in the long run), you review the material multiple times, spacing out each review session. This method leverages the psychological spacing effect, wherein our brains tend to retain information better when we learn it a few times over a longer span, rather than repeatedly in a short span.With Recall, you can review the summaries you have saved on a spaced repetition schedule. You will receive a weekly email with your summaries to review or you can review them directly from the web app.
What happens if Recall disappears one day?
It is understandable that there is some hesitation to invest your time into adding your information to a new application and the obvious fear that it may just disappear one day. I want to reassure you that we are fully committed to Recall for the long term. But in the unlikely and unfortunate case that Recall doesn’t work out we will ensure that there is more than enough time for users to export their data so that it can be moved to another application. We would also open-source the project to allow users to host Recall themselves.
Will there be mobile apps for Recall?
Yes, we are currently working on an Android application and an iOS one will follow. See here, for more information on upcoming features and our roadmap.
Why use Recall?
If you`re anything like us, then everyday you learn about interesting new things from blog posts and news articles you read, podcasts you listen to and videos you watch. Unfortunately most of what you learn from this content is forgotten within a couple of months. A practical solution to this is to summarize what you learn and write it down somewhere. However the problem with this approach is:
- It is time consuming and you often just don`t feel like taking down your own notes.
- And overtime you write down so much that it becomes difficult to find what you need when you need it.
Recall solves these problems by automatically summarizing content and categorizing it in a consistent way. Connections are also drawn between the content you add, helping resurface existing content when it is related to something new.