Frequently asked questions

A browser extension that adds a workspace to ChatGPT Web. You mark the parts of a conversation that matter — as a highlight, a bookmark, a note or a task — and Annota keeps them together with a link back to the message they came from, so you can find and reuse them later.

No. Annota is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to OpenAI. ChatGPT is a trademark of OpenAI. Annota is an independent extension that runs on top of the ChatGPT web interface in your own browser.

No. Annota has no model of its own and does not answer anything. It works inside ChatGPT and needs your ChatGPT account to have anything to work on.

Every saved item keeps a record of where it came from: the conversation, the message, where the passage sat inside it, and hashes of the text around it. That is enough to take you back to the original message later, and to tell you honestly when it can only get you close — or when the conversation is gone.

No, and it is worth being blunt about this. Source-linked means Annota remembers where something was said, not that it was true. Annota preserves provenance; judging the content is still your job.

They are four distinct intents rather than four labels on one thing. A highlight marks a passage inside a message. A bookmark marks a place you want to come back to. A note is something you wrote about it. A task is something to do, and carries an open or done status.

The type, the captured text, an optional title, your own note, a task status if it is a task, any tags, timestamps, and the source information that lets Annota find the message again. The Privacy Policy lists every field.

Tags are your own labels on a saved item, used to filter and group work across conversations. They are stored with the item and encrypted with it.

Reusable prompts with named variables you fill in when you use them, so a prompt you refined once does not have to be retyped from memory. They are stored on your device the same way saved items are.

Annota reopens the conversation and tries to place you on the exact message. It then tells you which of three things happened: it found the exact message; it reached the conversation but could only get near the right place; or the conversation is no longer available, in which case the short excerpt Annota kept is what remains.

Its content script runs only on chatgpt.com and chat.openai.com, and on those pages it can read the conversation that is on screen — which is how it finds the passage you selected and the message it belongs to. Reading is not storing: it records a conversation only where you save something.

To keep your saved items, prompt templates and settings on your device. Without it the extension would forget everything each time your browser restarted.

To find and manage your ChatGPT tabs: to know which conversation is still generating a reply, and to bring the right tab to the front when you act on a notification.

This one deserves a straight answer rather than a reassuring one. In principle the tabs permission lets an extension see tab information such as page titles and URLs, which is broader than the use described above. Annota uses it for that ChatGPT tab behaviour.

So it can tell you when a long ChatGPT response has finished while you were working in another tab.

To attach the authorisation header to the extension’s own connection to the Annota service. The rule is declared to the browser, which applies it; Annota does not read your traffic, and the rule targets its own requests.

It does not request access to all websites. Its site access is limited to the two ChatGPT hosts, the Annota service, and raw.githubusercontent.com for the configuration file described below.

The honest qualifier is the tabs permission above, which is a browser-level capability rather than site access. So: Annota’s page access is scoped to ChatGPT, and it is not reading the content of your other sites.

No. It does not copy your conversation history, and it uploads nothing at all unless you switch cloud synchronisation on. Even then, what is synchronised is the items you chose to save and your prompt templates — not your conversations.

Encrypted, in a local database in your browser named annota_secure_vault, on your machine.

No, and this is worth knowing precisely. Saved items, prompt templates and composer drafts go through the encrypted store. Your settings, your device state, your account session and the sync recovery phrase are held in ordinary extension storage. Your chat folders and which conversation you filed in which folder live in a second, unencrypted local database.

That second one holds folder names you wrote and ChatGPT conversation identifiers — information about your work, even though it holds none of the conversation text.

No. Annota ships in local-only mode and the synchronisation worker does not start until you change that setting and complete the sync setup.

Your saved items and prompt templates are serialised and encrypted inside the extension, and what is uploaded is the encrypted payload, the nonce needed to decrypt it, and a hash used to tell whether two copies differ. Composer drafts are not part of the payload. The service stores that payload against your account together with the nonce, the hash, a version number, its size and timestamps.

Yes, two things, and they are easy to overlook. When it starts on a ChatGPT page it asks the Annota service whether this extension version is still supported. On installation and browser startup it fetches a configuration file from raw.githubusercontent.com that tells it how to locate elements in ChatGPT’s interface, so it keeps working when ChatGPT changes.

Neither carries your content. Both, like any web request, reveal your IP address to the server they reach.

No. Annota has no integration with any model API. It works on ChatGPT; it does not send your saved content anywhere to be processed by a model.

There is no analytics, product-telemetry or error-reporting service in the extension, the backend or this website. The extension’s diagnostics setting is off by default, and its only other setting keeps diagnostics on your device. This website sets no cookies and loads nothing from a third party.

Each saved item, template and draft gets its own data key and is encrypted with AES-256-GCM. Those per-record keys are wrapped by a content master key, and only the ciphertext and the wrapped key are written to your local database. The unwrapped master key is held in the browser’s memory-backed session storage, restricted to the extension’s own trusted pages, and is not written to persistent storage.

By a separate mechanism: a recovery phrase generated on your device, from which the key that encrypts the upload is derived. The payload is encrypted in the extension before it is sent. The recovery phrase itself is kept on your device in ordinary extension storage so synchronisation can run without asking you each time.

Because the two mechanisms above are not yet one reconciled design, and because this project set itself a condition: an independent security review before publishing a stronger architectural description of its security. That review has not happened. Until it does, Annota describes what the code does and stops there, rather than reaching for a label it has not earned.

Yes. Annota uses an Annota account, and Google sign-in is currently the only way to create and reach one. There is no anonymous mode.

It is the single identity provider Annota supports today, behind an internal seam that would let another be added later. It spares Annota from holding a password of yours.

Your basic Google profile: a user identifier, your email address, your display name and your avatar URL. Not your password.

No. The sign-in requests only basic profile and email. It asks for no Gmail, Drive, Calendar or Contacts scope, so Annota has no way to reach any of them.

A phrase generated on your device when you set up cloud synchronisation. The key that encrypts your uploaded workspace is derived from it, and it is what lets a second device decrypt that workspace. Resetting it switches you back to local-only storage and leaves the copy already uploaded in place.

Yes, and it is treated as real work rather than a setting. Annota detects direction per paragraph, keeps code blocks, URLs and identifiers left-to-right inside a right-to-left paragraph, and lets you override the direction of a single message by hand and have that override remembered.

English and Persian ship with the extension. Which language the interface uses is a setting.

Not yet. The Chrome Web Store listing is not published, so there is no public install. Annota is pre-release.

It is built as a Chrome extension on Manifest V3. No release has been made for any other browser, and none is tested, so treat anything other than Chrome as unsupported today.

No. Annota runs on the ChatGPT website only — the desktop app is not a web page its content script can attach to. Other AI chat products are not supported today; the extension is built around an internal platform seam, but ChatGPT Web is the only implementation of it.

The extension’s settings can export your saved items as Markdown, and export a structured JSON backup of your saved items, templates and settings. The same screen imports a backup. Both run on your device and produce a file you keep.

Delete it where you see it. It is removed from your device, and if synchronisation is on, the change travels to your synchronised copy on the next upload.

No, and the button’s name is broader than what it does. It removes your saved items, prompt templates and encrypted records from your device. It does not currently remove your chat folders and chat-to-folder mappings, your settings, your session, or your sync recovery phrase — and it does not touch anything already uploaded.

There is no control for either today. The service is able to delete a user’s stored vault data, but nothing in the extension or on this site triggers it, and there is no self-service account deletion.

A published contact address for making such a request does not exist yet either. Both are open items rather than features that are merely undocumented, and saying so is more use to you than a reassuring sentence would be.

Nothing is on sale. No plan can be purchased, no payment provider is connected, and no prices have been decided. The plan shapes shown on the homepage are illustrative and are not an offer.

There is no published support address yet. Annota is pre-release and not publicly distributed, so there is no support channel to point you at rather than one that is merely hard to find.

The Privacy Policy and the Terms of Service.

Both are published in draft. They describe what Annota does accurately, but they carry no effective date and have not been through legal review, so neither is binding yet — and each one marks the points still to be settled rather than filling them in.