Hey there,

I'm happy to hit send on this public beta newsletter #11 describing the latest round of Readwise Reader updates (as well as some fun new stuff for your highlights in Readwise)!

As a reminder, we send this newsletter every one to two months covering features we've just shipped, bugs we've recently fixed, and tips to help you get the most out of Reader. If you prefer to read these in-app, you can subscribe to the private RSS feed linked here.

Some quick PSAs before the product updates:

• Guest Post — “I” in these newsletters typically refers to my cofounder Dan, but we’re switching it up this time such that your author today is me — Tristan. The outline remains the same, but the style might be different 😛
• Weekly Changelog — While we send these comprehensive updates only every so often to be mindful of your email inboxes, folks sometimes ask if we have a place where we share updates more frequently. We’re officially launching a brand new changelog, which we update weekly with everything new we’ve shipped, big and small, to both Readwise and Reader.
• Wise Up! — Last update, we shared that our customer support team is firing up a new, weekly newsletter called Wise Up! featuring the newest changelog, product usage videos, tips, tricks, and more. The first edition of Wise Up! will be going out next week, so subscribe here if you’re interested!

Without further ado, onto the updates:

• 💬 Chat With Highlights – You can now query, converse, and chat with your highlights using AI inside Readwise. In addition to the chat interface, there’s also an easy 1-click button on every highlight that instantly draws connections between any related highlights in your library.
• 🎬 YouTube V2 – Your saved YouTubes now feature cleaner transcripts, a resizable video player, and the option to choose your caption language.
• 🍎 Apple Notes Export – You can now automatically export highlights right into Apple Notes.
• 📚 Full Text Export to Obsidian – You can now automatically export entire article content — not just highlights — into Obsidian.
• 🗒️ Frontmatter Summaries – Your summaries now appear at the beginning of every document on mobile, making it easier to scan without needing to open a side panel.
• 🎶 Text-to-Speech v3 — Your TTS now includes even more lifelike voices, better progress tracking, and further polish.

As always, we’ve also shipped a handful of other improvements including full content export (to a zip file), offline indicators, API enhancements, a Wisereads discovery feature in-app, and more.

💬 Chat With Highlights

You can now chat with your entire library of highlights directly in Readwise!

To put it simply, chatting is like “super-powered search” across everything you've ever highlighted, whether that’s Reader, Kindle, or any other connected reading app.

Want to ask a detailed question about a book you finished three months ago? Looking for a specific tweet you saved but can’t remember the exact words? Hoping to see connections across different domains on a particular idea you’ve been capturing over the years?

Chat With Highlights makes all of this both possible and easy.

You’ll find the option to chat on the main Review tab of the Readwise mobile app and on web here: readwise.io/chat.

Although this feature lives in Readwise at the moment, it’s also useful to any Reader user who has taken highlights while reading.

As another point of entry, you’ll also now find a new button in the top right of every highlight in Readwise (across web and mobile) that finds similar highlights and synthesizes their takeaways.

As always, our intention is to keep improving this feature based on your feedback, so please don’t hesitate to send feedback our way. This feature is only the first of many as we continue to use AI to help you get the most out of your reading!

Props to Adam from our team for building this entire thing and Kris on design.

🎬 YouTube v2

YouTube v2 represents a bundle of improvements to the way you can consume YouTube videos in Reader:

• Automatically enhanced transcripts. Your YouTube transcripts now receive robust GPT-based cleanup automatically so they’ll have more logical formatting, punctuation, and paragraph breaks right out of the box. This is especially useful when highlighting your transcripts, enabling you to capture clearer takeaways than the default transcripts from Google. In most cases, this enhancement will now run automatically, but if not you can always toggle it with the button in the top-left (or bottom sheet on mobile).
• Resizable video windows. For times when you need to reference the transcript (or expand the video) while watching, you can resize videos to fit your preference, on both web and mobile!
• Choose your caption language. If a video includes multiple subtitles on YouTube, you can pick the language of your choice. (This also means you could brush up on your French or Spanish by reading the transcript in a secondary language.)

Props to Mati for knocking out all of these improvements.

🍎 Apple Notes Export

You’ve seen the meme. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably lived the meme. Well, no longer shall your highlights be trapped in the midwit middle. As of today, you can automatically export your highlights to the tails aka Apple Notes.

Jokes aside, many of our users value the simplicity of Apple Notes, and we’re super excited to deliver this long awaited integration.

To export your Readwise highlights to Apple Notes, make sure you’re on MacOS so you can install the helper tool and follow the instructions here: readwise.io/apple_notes.

Huge shout out to our newest intern Scott for building this thing basically from scratch, and then polishing it to perfection over the past two months.

🗃 Full Text Export to Obsidian

We pioneered the practice of automatically exporting your highlights and annotations to modern note-taking apps such as Obsidian. In the AI era, however, highlights are not always enough. Many of you want the entire text too. We hear you!

Now you can export the full text content of your articles from Reader to Obsidian as Markdown files, preserving the content alongside any highlights and notes you might have taken. Perfect for building your personal knowledge base or hooking into advanced features such as local embeddings, advanced search, or any number of other Obsidian plugins.

Check it out using the new toggle from your Obsidian export preferences. But be forewarned: if you have a lot of documents, this will send a lot of stuff to your vault :P

Props to Piotr from our team for the herculean technical effort to sync such huge amounts of data into Obsidian.

PS- If you don’t use Obsidian but still want full document text, we also shipped a way to batch export all of your Reader content (article text, all uploaded files etc) as well. See the Small Improvements section below for more!

📖 Frontmatter Summaries

We received a lot of requests to make Ghostreader summaries more accessible on mobile. Great news: you can now view summaries right in a document’s “frontmatter” without having to open a side panel. In addition, you can long-press the title (or open the bottom sheet) to see the summary in the list view.

Hopefully, these more accessible summaries help you more quickly recall what a piece was about or decide whether it’s worth continuing to read.

If these summaries are getting in the way of your reading experience, you can toggle them closed (and the app will remember your preference). If you leave them expanded and have auto-summarization on for your Feed, they’ll also show up in the Skim UI.

Props to Johannes for building this intricate feature.

🎶 Text-to-Speech v3

As of last week, Reader now has the most lifelike voices its had yet. These voices are powered by the new Kokoro model and make listening to your content even better :)

Try out the new voices (under the “English - V8” section in the text-to-speech voice selector) and let us know what you think!

We also fixed a bunch of bugs around progress tracking and added an easily accessible button on mobile for starting TTS no matter where you are in the document (not just the top).

Props to Artem as always for continuing to improve TTS.

🔔 Minor Improvements

• Export Full Document Content — Readwise is all about data portability (see: our dozens of export integrations to various note-taking apps, CSV, Markdown, uploaded files export, etc), but historically there’s been one type of data in Reader that hasn’t been exportable — the full text of articles you’ve saved. But no longer! You can now create a zip file containing the complete text for all articles saved in your Reader library, alongside all of your uploaded files.
• Paged Scroll Cutoff Text Fixed — We’ve identified and resolved many issues where the pages in our “Paged Scroll” mode would bleed over a page and be cut off.
• New Reader API Endpoints — Developers can now modify/delete documents and fetch their full content through our extended Reader API, opening up more possibilities for your custom workflows.
• RW1.0 Export API Enhancements — The Readwise 1.0 Export API now returns updated highlights (not just the new ones). This should smooth things out for folks who rely on consistent two-way synchronization.
• Ghostreader Support for o1 — If you’re using the GPT-4 or “OpenAI key in your Preferences” workflow, Ghostreader fully supports o1 for much higher quality responses.
• Offline Indicators — We built Reader offline-first from day one, but there would be times when newly saved documents didn’t have a chance to download before going offline. We’ve heard you on how frustrating this could be. To improve it, we’ve added helpful cloud icons to documents in the list views so you’ll know when a document isn’t ready to be read offline. If you see nothing, that means it’s downloaded!
• A million integration improvements — From Omnivore to Kobo to Notion to Obsidian, we’ve been hard at work keeping all the integrations running and useful :)
• Even Easier Ways to Add Documents — There’s a new in-app discovery feature that makes it easy to browse and add documents that were featured in Wisereads and fill your Reader up with more stuff to read (if you somehow have that problem!) Find it under the “Add Documents” (+) button on web and mobile.

We have many more improvements, both big and small coming. As a reminder, we love any/all feature requests, and really do use your feedback to help guide what to build! Here’s what Readwise subscriber Anthony sent us after we implemented something he requested:

🐛 Bug Fixes

As always, the team has been hard at work fixing dozens and dozens of bugs, most reported by you all as well (prepare for a long list…):

• Fixed a bug where the “find in document” feature didn’t work properly on YouTube videos.
• Fixed a bug with the bulk “mark as seen” progress indicator
• Fixed an issue where the Delete Document button was hard to reach for emails on mobile
• Fixed a bug with the upgrade flow and sales tax in the mobile apps
• Fixed a bug where the Original View for emails would not be remembered for a specific sender
• Fixed a bug where bulk deletions of documents would scroll you incorrectly, causing you to lose your place
• Fixed a bug where the search feature wasn’t properly indexing article content on mobile
• Fixed a bug where the annotation bar popover would appear when creating a highlight via double-tap
• Fixed an issue where the updatedAt date wasn’t displayed for list items in Trash on mobile
• Fixed a bug where article headers weren’t parsed correctly in the text
• Fixed a bug where the Reader API would return the original title, author, and metadata instead of the user-overridden values
• Fixed a bug where an excessively long author field wasn’t being truncated
• Fixed a bug causing Pocket imports to only bring in about 40 documents per day
• Increased the UI cap for Ghostreader summaries
• Fixed a bug making Original Mode email previews look visually jarring in the frontmatter feed
• Made the global summary toggle persist across app restarts
• Fixed a bug to split long transcript paragraphs when enhancing YouTube
• Added truncation for the name/domain field in the document reader and digest views
• Fixed a bug where the loading state wasn’t shown when transcripts were being enhanced on mobile
• Fixed a bug preventing Omnivore PDFs from importing
• Fixed a bug that caused incorrect saved_at timestamps for Omnivore
• Fixed a bug where some Omnivore imports would not include highlights
• Fixed a bug with summary open/close behavior in paginated scroll mode
• Fixed an issue causing an empty trash dialog on Android
• Fixed a bug where tag queries containing underscores would fail to return any items
• Resolved an issue with Send To Kindle where amazon would send a bunch of confirmation emails repeatedly
• Fixed a bug causing saved tweets in Pocket to import into Reader with no content
• Fixed a bug where highlighting would fail after sharing to Readwise until returning to the document
• Fixed Reader crashing on Samsung S24 devices
• Fixed a bug where TTS wouldn’t properly initialize on large documents
• Fixed an issue preventing documents from being delivered to Kindle via Send to Kindle
• Fixed a bug where feed or daily digest UI images often didn’t load on Android
• Fixed incorrect document counts in full article/file exports
• Fixed a bug causing punctuation to be parsed incorrectly in Unherd articles
• Fixed a bug where TTS launched from the list view wouldn’t update reading progress on web
• Fixed an issue where some forwarded newsletters were not arriving in Reader
• Handled a Ghostreader/OpenAI outage and re-created any missing summaries
• Fixed a TTS syncing issue
• Fixed a bug where the empty state messages wasn’t showing for the library view
• Fixed the zoom button UI on web PDFs
• Fixed an issue where space navigation placed the focus/indicator at the bottom of the screen
• Added the ability to resend documents to Kindle even if they were previously sent
• Fixed a flickering “No content” screen that appeared when trying to access documents offline
• Updated bulk action progress indicators to better reflect the actual progress
• Fixed a bug causing some forwarded emails to include only the “forwarded” header with no actual content
• Fixed an issue preventing the Apple Books Mac tool from downloading
• Fixed a bug causing JSON decoding errors on the send_to_kindle API endpoint
• Added highlight tag deletion sync between Readwise 1.0 and Reader
• Fixed a duplicate email error caused by Google autoforwarding messages
• Fixed layout issues for metadata frontmatter on the web
• Fixed a bug where the actions menu was unusable on unparseable items
• Fixed syncing issues on devices that persisted even after reinstalls
• Fixed a bunch of issues with the upgrade flow to the new Notion/Readwise integration
• Fixed an issue where users would sometimes see an error page when trying to manually export their highlights and notes
• Fixed image display issues affecting most images
• Fixed a bug where the Ghostreader toggle appeared “on” even after we stopped summarizing due to API errors
• Fixed a bug where opening a document could be stuck loading if opened immediately after the app starts
• Fixed an issue where tag renaming could time out and break the app syncing
• Fixed a bug causing the right panel to remain stuck on the "How to Save Articles" view
• Fixed a display issue where text was cut off at the bottom in landscape paged scroll mode
• Fixed a bug that broke the Ghostreader button on mobile for Discovery documents
• Fixed a bug on web causing errors when clicking the "More options" on a video header
• Fixed a bug where some articles would show up incorrectly as videos in Reader
• Fixed a bug where the sidebar would show a help message on web instead of information about the focused document
• Fixed a bug where the iPad app would crash when opening specific books
• Fixed an issue where Focus Mode wasn’t blurring surrounding content
• Fixed a weird scrolling issue with the Discover Wisereads modal on mobile
• Improved offline error messages for YouTube videos
• Fixed a parsing issue on Medium.com that caused links in boxes to behave incorrectly
• Added a Seen/Unseen option to custom swipes configuration
• Fixed a bug where starting TTS on an email forced the view to toggle between text and original modes
• Fixed a bug preventing some users from disabling Ghostreader document-level prompts
• Fixed an author name filter issue that led to the wrong article and broke the UI
• Fixed various offline screen display issues
• Fixed an issue where images were exporting as just URLs to Google Docs
• Fixed issues with long urls messing up the Notion export
• Fixed an issue causing Kobo automatic highlight syncing to fail
• Fixed a focus indicator bug when switching between original and enhanced YouTube transcripts
• Parsing fixes! Since the last update, we fixed known parsing issues on all of the following domains (across tens of thousands of articles):
  • nytimes.com
  • danluu.com
  • notion.so
  • theverge.com
  • ycombinator.com
  • zeit.de
  • cdixon.org
  • todayintabs.com
  • bsky.app
  • moretothat.com
  • unherd.com
  • mp.weixin.qq.com
  • archive.is
  • archive.md
  • archive.ph
  • gatesnotes.com
  • indianexpress.com

🖼️ Creator Content

The Verge

Despite the recent release of new Kindle devices, The Verge continues to make a strong case for the Book Palma and Palma 2. Reader may have something to do with it ;)

Erin Moore

Our community manager Erin released three brand new onboarding videos for Reader, which reflect all of the UI improvements and major features we’ve added since 2022. You can check out the full playlist here.

Mario Gabriel

If you aspire to enter Monk Mode in 2025, Mario Gabriel over at The Generalist has 10 tips for you.

Prasanth Kancharla

In his latest blog post — which is part review and part product design rumination — Prasanth shares the “a-ha” moment during his Readwise trial that convinced him to stay.

The Fernandina Explorer

Thanks to Deryck Burnett, Reader received its first shoutout in a local newspaper! In his latest article, he shares why he’s transitioned from Pocket to Reader.

👋 Farewell

That’s all for now. Thank you again for your continued support — and as always, feel free to reach out with questions, feedback, or just to share your reading adventures!

PS- We’re working on some big stuff and as part of that, we’re talking to new and existing users a lot. So much so, that we’re recruiting a Contract UX Researcher to help us coordinate our efforts. If interested, take a look and let us know! Disclaimer: While we pride ourselves on responding to everyone who reaches out, we’ve already received over 300 applications from a passing LinkedIn post from our research advisor Loi, so we’ll do our best…

Until next time,
– The Readwise Team