Chat With Your Journal: Ask Questions About Your Own Entries
What if you could ask your diary a question and get an answer drawn from your own entries? That's the whole idea behind Writed — and it runs on your device.
A journal is a record of your life, but it's a passive one. The answer to "how was I feeling around the move last spring?" is in there somewhere — you just have to scroll for an hour to find it.
What if you could ask?
That's the core idea behind Writed: a journal you can chat with. Ask a question in plain English and get an answer drawn from your own entries, with the source entry and date shown so you can verify it.
What it feels like
You might ask:
- "What did I write about my job interview in March?"
- "When did I last mention feeling burned out?"
- "Summarize what I said about my trip to Lisbon."
Writed finds the relevant entries and answers in your own words — like a diary that talks back. Every answer cites the entry and date it came from, so it's grounded in what you actually wrote, not invented.
How it works (briefly)
Under the hood this is retrieval-augmented generation:
- Each time you save an entry, Writed splits it into chunks and computes an embedding for each one.
- When you ask a question, it embeds the question and finds the most relevant chunks using hybrid search — semantic similarity, keyword matching, and a recency boost.
- A chat model reads those chunks and writes the answer, citing sources.
The important part: all of this runs on your device. The embedding model and the chat model both execute in your browser — your journal is never uploaded to answer a question.
Why private matters here especially
Plenty of apps offer "chat with your journal," but most send your entries to a cloud AI service to do it. That's the opposite of what a diary should be. Writed keeps the entire pipeline local: there's no server, no account, and no upload. The only network request is a one-time download of the model files on your first visit.
It's also free and open source (MIT), so you can confirm exactly how it handles your words.
Getting good answers
A few tips:
- Write naturally. The more you journal, the more there is to retrieve. Even short daily entries add up fast.
- Be specific in questions. "What did I say about my landlord in January?" beats "tell me about my apartment."
- Use a desktop. The chat model is fastest with WebGPU on a laptop or desktop; phones use a slower fallback.
Ask your own journal something
Open Writed, write a few entries, and ask it a question. The answer comes from your words — and never leaves your machine.
Frequently asked questions
- Does the AI make things up about my journal?
- Writed grounds answers in your actual entries using retrieval, and shows the source entry and date for each answer so you can verify it. It answers from your words rather than inventing facts.
- Where does the chat happen — on a server?
- No. Both the embedding model and the chat model run in your browser on your device. Your entries are never uploaded to answer a question.
- How many entries do I need before chat is useful?
- Even a handful helps, but the more you write, the better the retrieval. There's no limit — entries are a few KB each and stored locally.