The Ultimate Recall Tutorial: Take Control of Content & Build Your Lifelong Knowledge Base

We've probably spent hours this week watching videos, listening to podcasts, reading articles. But how much of it was actually worth our time and how much was just fluff? You know that two-hour-long podcast where the real takeaway only hits at minute 57? And then what about the things we care about when it's scattered across bookmarks, notes, messages to yourself? How do you find it when you need it most? Well, with a recall, you can pre-screen content before you commit to it. Save it all in one personal knowledge base, searchable and accessible forever. I'm Sanks, one of the co-founders of Recall, and what you're looking at is my personal recall knowledge base. I have over 3,000 pieces of content saved, my favorite movies, recipes, podcasts that I don't want to forget, all automatically categorized and searchable forever. And in the next few minutes, I'm going to show you how to get your own personal knowledge base up and running. Now you can access Recall via the web app, which is what you've seen now, but we also have a mobile app, which is great for when you're out and about. And one of my personal favorite ways to access Recall is via the browser extension. So I highly recommend that when you're on desktop, one of the first things to do is to go ahead and install the extension. Once it's installed, I do recommend that you pin the extension so it sits on your toolbar and it's easy to access. Now, when you come to a really long form piece of content and you're not so sure if it's worth your time, you can just go ahead and click the Recall browser extension and you can see it creates a really nice, concise summary of the video, which you can use to skim through and see if it's something that you're interested in. Or in this case, I would even just get to the point and ask a question. So in this case, why is fasting bad for women? And you get an answer based on the actual video. So this isn't a conversation with the internet, it's with the actual piece of content. I might skim through this and if I find it interesting, I'm going to go ahead and add it to my notebook. So just an overview of what's in the extension. The notebook is where that automatic summary was saved. It's also where your AI actions are saved. So now this conversation, this chat is saved into the notebook. It's also fully editable. Now you also have the reader. The reader is the full original content. So in this case, it's the full YouTube transcript. And there's also a connections tab, which automatically extracts content and connects it together. But we'll get deeper into connections in a minute. Coming back to the notebook, what I really love is these timestamps. So I can skip to particular parts of the video that's interesting. Before I do that, though, I click this little lock button. So when I skip to particular parts, the extension doesn't move. I can just use it to navigate to certain sections while keeping the extension side by side. Again, I mentioned the notebook is editable. So if I see something interesting, I can come in, highlight, I can take my own notes. So you can really use it as a typical editor. Now, when I save the content into recall, you can see that it's been automatically categorized as health, female physiology. Now I didn't add that tag. The AI figured out what the right tag would be. And that's because I already have a big category called health. And I have a subcategory called female physiology. And it figured out that was a great way to store that content. If you weren't happy with it, you can drag and drop it into other sections. You can also just delete it and add your own tag. I do recommend checking out one of our deep dive videos or our docs on tags, just so you can learn a little bit more about how to fully customize your tag. Let's spend a little bit of time with what's happened now that you've saved this content into recall. You have a title, it's fully editable. You have a link to the original source. We have tags, which we just covered. And you also are looking at a split screen view where I have my notebook on the left hand side and my reader on the right. Now this view is fully customizable. If you'd rather, let's say, have connections on the right, you can drag and drop it into place. If you're finding that the split screen view is quite overwhelming, maybe you prefer just a single screen. You can click that little arrow and it will just compress it into a single screen with all of your tabs. The tabs itself can also be dragged and dropped into a different place, so you can customize that as well. As a recap, I've got my notebook here and everything I did in the extension, the highlights, the notes, it's automatically synced with what I've now saved in my knowledge base. And I've got the reader, that's the original content. And chat is now its own tab. A couple things to note, if you want to switch between that concise summary to a detailed summary, you can just select that default action. And when you're ready to save it, you can just go ahead and add it to the notebook. So that's a quick way for you to quickly switch between a detailed or concise summary. You can also change that in your settings. So if you always prefer a detailed summary, you can configure that in your settings. A few other things, we have that connections tab we've mentioned, we've got a quiz. So if you wanted to rejog your memory off that content, you can generate an AI quiz and just put your knowledge to the test. And there's also a graph view, but I'll get more into that in a bit more detail later. Couple other things while we're here. You can share your content with anyone, so you can copy this link. It's then live and no one needs to sign up, but they can access the summary, they can access your notes and the full original content. You can also adjust your font size if you prefer something larger, something smaller. And you can also always export this content to markdown or even change the images if you don't like the header, upload another image and make that your own image, or you can add your own images to the notebook itself. Now there are many other ways that you can add content into recall. You can just come into the app, click add content and then paste in the URL of any online content, podcasts, articles, videos, and there's a lot more that we're looking to support. You can also just use quick search on Wikipedia. I love to do this when I'm adding movies. So my favorite movie, Burn After Reading, it then saves the recall card, it categorizes it as movie, and it also pulls in the full Wikipedia page. I can also upload PDFs, so up to a hundred megabyte PDFs. And I can also bulk import, which is just a great way to get a lot of content into recall almost instantly. So you can import up to a thousand bookmarks, import from pocket, or even import up to 10,000 markdown files. And that's just a great way to just speed up building up to a knowledge base. And you can also just create your own notes. So you can come in here, put a title in, take some notes, and it's also able to enable you to chat with your own notes. So have a conversation with your own notes. You can even quiz yourself on your own notes and you'll be surprised on how much you actually can get wrong, even quizzing yourself on notes you've taken yourself. I personally love to take my own notes when it comes to my journals. And then I will chat with all of them to pick up patterns or trends that I might miss myself. Another tip is to share content directly with the recall when you're on the mobile app. So you can just share any online content directly with the recall mobile app, and it will automatically create that summary, tag it, and it's a great way to build up your knowledge base while you're on the go. Getting our way back to the homepage, I do want to get you familiar with how to navigate your recall knowledge base. So you can sort your cards in a few different ways. We have a list view if you prefer something more compact, and you can also order it by alphabetical order or last created at a couple different options there. If you click this little arrow on the left side, it expands your tags. Now tags again is just a way to organize content within recall. If I then select health, all my content in the main view is then filtered on what's saved in health. I can then just click clear, and that takes me back to my homepage. I can also just collapse it if I want more space. On the left hand panel, we now have access to some of our features that now pertain to the whole knowledge base. So previously we've been looking at features on a specific card, but some of our most powerful features is when you take all that information you've saved and you can access it at once, which brings us to my all time favorite feature, chat with knowledge base. With chat GPT, you're having a conversation with the entire internet, but with a recall, you're having a conversation with all the personal content that you've been saving. So to get started here, one of the first things I recommend is just setting some context. You can click this at button and then select a tag that you're interested in. In this case, let's say productivity, but you could do this for nested tags, some tags, or just specifying specific cards that you want to chat to or compare. So talking to all the content I saved under productivity, I could ask, make me a routine to optimize my focus and productivity and enhance it using my journals. So I've been taking journals and recall, and I'd love to combine the hundreds of content on productivity that I've been saving with my own personal journals, just so I can get a really tailored protocol. So here you can see all of the contents it's referenced. It's got a mix of content I've been saving myself, like my journals, but also all of those productivity podcasts. I think I uploaded over a hundred podcasts from Tim Ferriss and Cal Newport and bulk imported them using the bookmarks. And in a way it's like I'm having a conversation with them and their expertise and then enhancing it using my own personal information. So even here you can see it references particular timestamps where things were mentioned. It mentions treat focus time as on or off with simple rules to respect these boundaries. I can see that it's referencing a Cal Newport YouTube video, and I can then skip to the exact point in the video where that was mentioned. So I now have a really detailed schedule that's combined expert advice that I trust along with my own personal journals. Now I can get nuts with examples for how I use chat. I've bulk imported podcasts from Eckhart Tolle, who's a spiritual leader, and I feel like I'm speaking to him when I need advice on my ego and keeping myself in check. I love speaking with my journals. I love speaking with my recipes. When I have a big dinner party and I have about 10 different recipes that I want to make, I quickly use it to make a shopping list. Do check out my use cases where I go a lot deeper on this. And we're working on some docs that cover all of the use cases with chats. Before we wrap up, I just want to spend a little bit of time on some of the foundations of recall. And that is the knowledge graph, which starts with connections. So when you open up a piece of content and you have a look at the connections tab, what you're seeing are keywords that have been automatically extracted from your content and linked together. So here you see the word dopamine and the number 15. And that's because dopamine has been mentioned in 15 other pieces of content that I've saved within recall. Now if you see connections here that are not that interesting to you and you actually want to remove it, you can just hover over it and unlink that connection or you can create your own connections. Now there's two key ways to do that. The first is you can just highlight a word. So let's say Alzheimer's and then flick the lightning bolt. This will then pull up a short list to either let you create an empty card, so create a blank card on Alzheimer's or link to existing cards or pull up a card from Wikipedia. So in this case, it's pulled up a Wikipedia page on Alzheimer's and linked to 12 other pieces of content that also mention Alzheimer's. If I also want to link to content that isn't on Wikipedia but is actually just in my own knowledge base, I can do that as well. So this is a YouTube video on sugar cravings. I might want to link it to some of my recipes. So for this, I'm going to the forward slash sign and this pulled up a bit of a search where I can then type in my avocado chocolate mousse. And here I have a mix of the avocado Wikipedia page or my avocado chocolate mousse. So when I open up avocado chocolate mousse, I now have a backlink that takes me to that original piece of content on killing your sugar cravings. These connections play quite an important role in recall. In fact, it forms the base of a relatively new feature, which is augmented browsing. To turn this on, you go to browser extension settings, you click enable augmented browsing. You can also turn on the widget. They go quite nicely hand in hand. And what happens is then as you're browsing, first you see this little widget pop up. And this then mentions the number of connections I have on a given page back to my knowledge base. So the idea here was when you save so much content into recall, how can you have it instead of just sitting passively resurface as you're browsing other relevant information. And so here I have 45 connections back to my knowledge base. I can see that these little highlights pop up as I browse. So here I can see the word Nora Periphery. And I might think I've seen this word Nora Periphery before, where have I seen it? And I can see that it was mentioned in this podcast that I had listened to years ago. And when I click on it, it takes me back to the exact place in my knowledge base where Nora Periphery was mentioned. So I get a really nice reminder. Even for 20 seconds, it's known to increase Nora Periphery by 200%. So that's crazy. You know, I've forgotten about cold bath and the impact on Nora Periphery. And I've gone from browsing an article to ending up back in my knowledge base and making this connection. While that's really fun, you might see some words that you're not that interested in seeing again. So you could hover over it and just click this little eye to unlink it. And you can also add particular sites that you don't want augmented browsing showing on. All that said, augmented browsing is local first. So as you're browsing and have augmented browsing turned on, nothing leaves your device. The last part to mention on connections is that visual representation. So you may have gotten a bit more curious on that graph view. And this really shows you how your cards are linking together in a more visual format. So here I can see this podcast mentions inflammation. I can then click that plus sign and it then opens up into all the other content that I have that mentions inflammation and could link me to a completely separate topic on longevity molecules. This is now the single card graph view, but you can also see a graph view of all the content in your knowledge base. I have over 3,000 pieces of content, so this really looks insane. It's unmanageable. And so I really come in and filter it. So if I'm doing a bit more work on SEEP, I might want to click into my SEEP graph view. This is a lot more manageable, so I can actually come in and zoom into particular connections that might be interesting to explore more. That said, I think there's a lot more that we can do on our graph view to bring a lot more utility and management to it. The last feature I'll leave you with, which also pertains to the whole knowledge base, is the recall review. Now you would have seen that quiz we created earlier. And what it does is it takes a card that you've generated a quiz on, shuffles it up, and creates this personalized learning schedule for you. So the more that you get answers incorrect, the more you'll keep seeing that answer. The more you get answers correct, the less you'll see it. And so it really uses these two scientific techniques of active recall and spaced repetition to create this schedule for you to help you offset your forgetting curve. This is the personal note I got of social media a few years ago. And I still found that I had this itch to want to do something on my phone. And I found that actually coming into recall and navigating to some of the content that I'm interested in and running a little recall review was just a great way to use my time and actually ensure that the content that I was trying to learn, I actually was grasping and putting my knowledge to the test. Do note that we have quite a lot of customization available within your knowledge base. So head over to your settings where you can change to a light theme or you can switch your default action, change your languages, have a little bit of fun playing around with these settings. I believe you at that. I honestly have transformed the way I decide to spend my time with content, transformed the peace of mind I have with where I save precious information that I care about. And I have to say I have been having so much fun with our chat with knowledge base feature, really extracting value from all the things I've been saving over the years and uncovering insights that I truly would have missed without recall. Do give us a go. We would love your feedback. We're actively building and iterating on recall. And you, our users, is what really helps us shape that. So thank you for watching this and would love to hear from you. Cheers.