Grounded in your book
Every lecture and answer starts from retrieved passages with page citations, then adds explanation. Web search is a last resort, with cited sources.
Products · Recitation · Private preview
Upload any textbook. Recitation builds a complete course around it — curriculum, interactive lectures, graded problem sets — and a professor who remembers what you've learned. It runs entirely on your own machine.
re·ci·ta·tion — in university usage, the class hour in which students recite their answers back to the professor. The whole loop: the professor lectures, you answer, they grade.
How it works
Recitation treats your book the way a good professor would: read it first, plan the course, then teach it — one section at a time, at your level.
PDF, text, or Markdown. Text and tables are extracted; pages with figures are marked so the professor can send you to them.
A two-phase curriculum — units, then lessons with objectives and durations. Rename, reorder, or regenerate anything.
Streamed lectures, one section per turn, ending with “Any questions before we continue?” Socratic follow-ups for vague answers.
Conceptual and numerical problems with verdicts, hints, and explanations. Numerical answers are checked with tolerance and units.
Features
Every lecture and answer starts from retrieved passages with page citations, then adds explanation. Web search is a last resort, with cited sources.
Your position, quiz results, mastered concepts, and a running summary of everything taught — so page 600 still remembers page 12.
Tell it your level and prior courses. It won't assume what you don't know, and won't re-teach what you do.
Speak your questions with on-device transcription. Hear lectures in natural voices generated locally — pause or stop mid-sentence.
Math renders properly, inline and display. Every session exports as clean Markdown lecture notes.
Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, llama.cpp, your own server, or a cloud API. No native function-calling required — small local models work.
Privacy
Recitation is a local application. Your courses, progress, and settings live in a database on your computer — not on our servers. We don't operate a service your data passes through.
Editions
The personal edition is free. For schools and organizations, we deploy Recitation on hardware you control — and help you size it.
Questions
It reads first. Every lecture section and answer is grounded in passages retrieved from your book, with page citations, and then supplemented with the model's own knowledge for clarity. It's instructed not to jump ahead to later chapters and never to invent a citation.
Recitation runs on macOS and Linux and talks to any OpenAI-compatible model server. A modern laptop running a small local model works; larger local models, or a server on your network, give richer lectures. You can also connect a cloud provider you trust.
Yes. With a local model and the voice models downloaded once, Recitation works fully offline. Only the optional web-search fallback needs a connection.
Text-based PDFs, plain text, and Markdown. Tables are extracted, and figures are referenced by page. Scanned books need OCR first — built-in OCR is on the roadmap.
No. Institutional deployments run on hardware the institution owns or controls. We provide the software, deployment guidance, and support.
Recitation is in private preview. Tell us what you're studying — or what your institution teaches — and we'll get you in.