Tips and tricks

Athena keeps your library, progress, notes and vocabulary under one account. This page is about a few habits that tie them together. Nothing here is new — it is just how the existing features work best.

A library that travels: import on the computer, read on the phone

Batch-import on the computer, check titles and authors, arrange shelves, and leave the phone for reading. Progress, highlights and notes sync on their own, so the next device opens right where you left off. To read offline on the train, open the book once while online and it is cached on that device.

Activating AI the right way

Before you can ask about a book, it has to be activated (menu on the cover → Activate AI). Activation never happens on its own and does not use any credits. After importing a batch, activate the ones you want to study straight away so they are ready when a question comes up. The filter in the library's top-right corner lists everything that is still "AI not activated" so you can clear them in one go.

Use shelves for topic research

Put a few books on the same subject onto one shelf, then set the scope of an AI conversation to that shelf. The answer draws on all of them, with a citation on every sentence — tap one to jump back to the passage. For essays, reading groups or comparing several authors, this is far faster than asking book by book. The scope can also be the whole library, but narrowing to a shelf is usually more accurate.

Notes, one level up

Notes can be written directly on a highlight, so they stay anchored to the passage. For anything longer, use the full-screen editor: a new note opens in it, an existing note can be expanded to it, and going back saves. Type "/" while editing for the quick-insert menu — headings, task lists, tables and images are all in there. When reading a foreign language, add words to the vocabulary list and the home page will tell you how many are due today. Every note, highlight and word can be found by keyword in global search.

Listening tips

Listening uses your device's speech engine by default: it works offline and costs nothing. The lock screen and notification shade let you pause, skip a sentence back or forward, and show the cover and chapter. Set a sleep timer for bedtime and playback stops at the end of a sentence. If a phone will not read aloud, run "Settings → Listening → Speech self-check" first; it walks through the fixes from cheapest to most involved.

Reading goals and statistics

Set a daily and a yearly goal on the home page cards, and turn on the reminder under "Settings → Reading" — if you have not read enough that day, it nudges you once at the time you chose. Streaks, weekly activity and the yearly heatmap live in "Reading statistics": in the sidebar on the computer, from your profile on the phone.

A privacy mindset

Every core feature works offline. Your books and notes are visible only to you, and we never train models on them. AI and text recognition need a connection and pass the content required for the task to third-party AI providers — if you would rather a book never touched AI, simply do not activate it. Cloud-voice API keys stay on the device and are never synced. The "Privacy and data" page has the details; anything legally binding is in the privacy policy.