AI features

Athena's AI works on what you imported: it reads the contents of your library, answers questions about that material, and shows you where the answer came from. Ebooks, papers and notes are all fair game.

What is included

- Ask your library: ask about one item, a shelf, or the whole library; answers cite their sources and you can jump back to the original.

- Summarize: have the AI condense a chapter or a whole file.

- Translate: instant translation of selected text.

- Text recognition (OCR): turn scanned PDFs into text that can be searched, copied and queried (the result is not used for listening).

- AI dictionary: explains a word in the sentence you are reading, which a fixed dictionary cannot do.

Getting started

1. Open AI conversations from the sidebar or the dock, or long-press text while reading and pick an AI action. On a computer the sidebar keeps your history; inside the reader you can ask while you read.

2. Choose a scope: one item, a shelf, or the whole library.

3. Before you can ask questions, an item needs AI activation, and this never happens on its own: open the cover menu in your library, choose "Activate AI" and confirm. Activation itself costs no credits; the menu shows "Activating AI" while it runs, and you can ask once it finishes.

About citations

Answers cite the source and a rough location. That is deliberate: the AI can be wrong, and citations are what let you check. Open the citation and read the original, especially when you are about to act on the answer.

AI status on covers

A badge on the cover shows whether an item is activated or still activating. The library filter for "AI activated / not activated" picks out what you still cannot ask about.

Cost and quotas

AI features consume credits, and different capabilities and models consume different amounts. Your live balance and your daily and monthly allowances are shown on your account page; the rules and plan differences are on the pricing page — that page reflects the rules currently in force, which is why this manual does not restate the numbers.

Troubleshooting

"Needs activation": choose "Activate AI" from its menu in the library; if activation is already running, wait for it to finish.

The answer says it cannot find anything: it may not be activated yet, or what you asked really is not in it. Narrowing the scope to a single item usually gives a sharper answer.

A scanned PDF yields nothing: run OCR first. Without a text layer, the AI is looking at a picture.

Unavailable offline: AI and knowledge-base retrieval need a connection. This is one of the few parts of Athena that does.

Limits and notes

What you submit is used only to generate that one answer. It is never used to train any model, and never for advertising or profiling.

Some capabilities send the content needed for that feature to third-party AI providers for processing. Those providers are contractually bound and may not use it for anything beyond the service. See the privacy policy for details.