Show HN: A visual AI interface to understand papers/books/topics

Cursor and the agenetic IDEs are great for this kind of context control. Although designed for code, I’ve started using them for regular language, by converting large docs to broken-up plain text files (which it can do for you). Then you can @ whatever chapter you like in your questions

NotebookLM is in my mind an introductory product for deep understanding which does RAG and long podcasts well. However, strong understanding requires much more. We are still building out a coherent experience, but key ingredients are a strong exploration artifact (our map aims to be that), rich source control, context engineering (of the nature you pick up on above), and switching between modalities. We also have a powerful reader which lets us switch to various levels of summaries/original source on a chapter level, and jump between these easily. There's also friction in Notebooklm like you have to find web sources manually; our agent aims to do that from a simple text request. Going forward, we aim to add the ability to have a strong note taking experience (you can take hierarchical notes, AI assisted), and the agent should nudge you to complete what you are trying to achieve in a space.

In the chat agent, there's an option to turn off AI knowledge; and we are adding chapter level context control. I think 'start until upto this point' (and 'from this point to end of text') are great additions. Will add.

Regarding the generalization, I think with strong context engineering and powerful reasoning, this is hopefully achievable. But making a bespoke feature for this feels hard.

Thanks for your feedback!

Thank you!

Thank you!

I love Obsidian too! It is unclear to me if I want to manage this kind of service on my laptop, or want fundamental cross device functionality to consume on phone when we want to. For now, web is our platform of choice.

That is great to know; thank you! Would you be willing to pay a bit extra for higher security tiers/privacy?

We are iterating fast and solving issues, indeed, and are aware of some problems.

It would be helpful to understand what you mean more precisely with the last line, particularly if you've experimented with this graph style and found it seriously inhibiting. Our assumption in fact isn't that the visual graph style is optimal for a LOT of depth. It is useful for some 'unknown' period of exploration. We have alternatively a tree representation of the same information, which we find becomes quickly better to use, once you have a lay of the topic and are more familiar with top level ideas. Then for specifi