Paste a link
Put the article URL after smry.ai and the reader opens on it.https:/example.com/..., and the
bare example.com/the-article. Your address bar keeps showing what you pasted.
smry hands the page to the reader internally instead of bouncing you somewhere
else.
Reading needs no account. Signing in is what adds saving, sync and search.
Links to x.com and twitter.com open in the same reader. So do the other ways in
— a browser extension, an iOS shortcut, a bookmarklet, the in-app Import page.
Those are on Capture.
What you get
The article, cleaned: title, byline, site name, date, body text. No side rails, no newsletter modal, no cookie wall. A short summary appears above it without you asking for one. Automatic summaries are on by default and you can switch them off in Settings → Summary. From there the page is yours to work with. Change the font, size, line spacing, width and theme. Have it read aloud. Highlight a passage and write a note on it. Translate it. Ask a question about it.Keep it
Saving files the article into a library only you can see. Each item carries a status —inbox, later or archive — a star, and whatever tags you give it.
The clean text is stored with it, so your copy survives the page going away.
Opening the reader is not the same as saving. Every article you open is written
to History instead: one row per link, the first time you read it. That log is
how “the tab I closed three weeks ago” stays findable without you having
deliberately filed anything.
Find it again
Press ⌘K anywhere in the app. One box searches saved items, History, highlights, notes, your followed feeds and the commands themselves, and it recovers from a misspelling rather than returning nothing.What it is not
smry cleans up pages it can fetch as an ordinary anonymous visitor. That is the whole boundary, and it has three edges worth knowing. Two publishers are blocked by name and will not be read at all: The New York Times and the Orlando Sentinel. Pages behind a sign-in cannot be read. smry has no session on the site, so anything that only exists after you log in is invisible to it. The browser extension is the exception, because it captures the page your own browser already rendered.Questions
Do I need an account?
Do I need an account?
Not to read. The reader, summaries, highlights in that browser, and one
listen a day all work signed out. Saving, syncing across devices, search
and export of your library need an account.
What happens when a page will not load?
What happens when a page will not load?
You get told which kind of failure it was, not a shrug. There are six:
smry is overloaded, you are being rate limited, nothing is cached for that
link, the site is a hard paywall, the publisher is unsupported, or the URL
itself was rejected as unsafe.
Are my highlights private?
Are my highlights private?
Yes, until you publish one. Highlights, notes and saved items are yours
alone. Sharing is a separate, deliberate action — and worth reading about
before you take it, because a share link stays readable by anyone holding
it.
Do my reader settings follow me to another device?
Do my reader settings follow me to another device?
Font, size, width, theme and word anchors are stored in the browser you set
them in. Highlights, notes, saved items and History do sync once you are
signed in.
Can I get my reading back out?
Can I get my reading back out?
Yes. Settings → Export builds a zip of your articles, highlights, notes,
files and data as Markdown and JSON, in the browser, with no account
required.
Next
The reader
The reading surface, its addresses, and the controls that change it.
Highlights and notes
Seven colours, notes, and ten places to export them.
Your library
Saving, triage, tags, and how History differs from your saved list.
Finding things again
What ⌘K covers, and why a typo still finds the thing.
Listen to an article
Ten voices, playback that survives navigation.
Follow your sources
Publications, YouTube, podcasts and accounts in one queue.