Pilcrow

Answers you can check, against your own lectures

Pilcrow answers a question from the course material you loaded, and prints the lecture and the timestamp it came from underneath — so the next thing you do is go and listen to that minute, not take our word for it.

Named for ¶, the mark that points at one specific paragraph in a text. That is exactly what a citation to a lecture timestamp does.

Every answer names its source

A model that answers from nothing in particular gives you a paragraph you have no way to verify. Pilcrow retrieves the passages from your transcripts, slides and notes first, answers from those, and prints the line From Lecture 3 (04:12) under the answer. Open that lecture at that minute and you can hear whether it says what the answer claims.

That is also why it tells you when it could not do that. If nothing in your material was relevant, the line says "From general knowledge — nothing in your course matched", in those words, instead of dressing a guess up as a citation. Knowing which kind of answer you are reading is the point.

Answers are generated, and generated answers are sometimes wrong. The citation is how you find out which.

Your course material stays on your phone

The transcripts, slides and notes you load are stored only in the app's own database, on your device. There is no upload step and no server-side copy of your library. The search that picks the relevant passages runs on the phone too; only the handful of passages that matched — a page or two of text — is sent with your question.

The photograph itself does go to our server, which flattens the angle and passes it to Anthropic to be read — and it is held in memory for the length of that request rather than filed away, then deleted from your phone as soon as the scan ends. The privacy policy names every company involved and states all of this as specific, checkable behaviour rather than as a promise.

How it works

1. Load your course. Lecture captions and transcripts (.srt, .vtt), PDFs, .docx documents, plain text and Markdown notes, and photographs of handwritten pages. The app reads them and indexes them on the device.
2. Point the phone at the question and tap. Working through a problem set, going back over work you have already handed in, or picking apart a lecture you only half-followed.
3. Read the answer, then check it. Large type for reading at a distance from the screen, with the source line underneath. Every question visible in the photo is answered together.

What it costs

A scan is one photograph, and every question on it is answered together for that one scan. Monthly scans do not carry over; pack scans never expire and outlive a cancelled subscription. Prices are in US dollars — Apple charges you in your own currency, with tax where it applies. A subscription renews automatically until you cancel it, which you do in iOS Settings; the support page says exactly where.

Getting Pilcrow

Questions

The support page covers what a scan costs you, moving a course to a new phone, the search index, and where to cancel — and anything it does not cover goes to hello@aktasfatih.com, which a person reads. The terms of service and the privacy policy are the rest of the small print.

What it is not

It is a study tool, and it is built to be used like a worked solution or a study group: to find out whether you understood something and to send you back to the part of the lecture you missed. Every school has its own rules about what help is allowed on what work, they differ between courses, and following them is yours to do.

It also has no idea what is on the screen you photograph, it is wrong sometimes, and it is one person's small service rather than a utility. All three are written down properly in the terms.