How to use IdeaM.

Toolbar → Bring In menu → Research & Import

Bring In Anything is the heart of IdeaM. Pull in content from many sources at once — YouTube videos, PDFs, web pages, audio, images, and documents — and IdeaM reads them and synthesizes everything into one unified, structured outline. You can merge new sources into your current outline, or create a fresh one.

• YouTube videos — paste any URL; the transcript is extracted automatically and the video title becomes the default name.
• Audio & conversation — paste a transcript, upload an audio file, or record live; speaker diarization identifies who said what.
• Documents — PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and images with OCR text extraction.
• Web pages, plain text and notes, existing outline files, and video files (audio extracted).

Toolbar → Bring In menu → Import Email (turn on Email tools in Settings first)

Bring an email — a single message or a whole thread — into IdeaM as a clean, structured outline. Instead of a wall of quoted text, the AI distills it into Summary, Key Points, Decisions, and Action Items.

Email tools are off by default. Turn them on in Settings → Professional Customization, then choose Import Email from the Bring In menu.

1. 1Open the Bring In menu and choose Import Email.
2. 2Paste the email or the entire thread into the box — and/or drop a .eml file.
3. 3Choose where it goes: create a new outline (the default), add to the current outline, or save into your Second Brain.
4. 4Click Import. Suspected junk (promos, spam, newsletters) is filed into a clearly-labeled “Filtered — likely junk” branch — never deleted — so you can rescue anything it got wrong.

Toolbar → Bring In menu → Research & Import

Import multiple sources simultaneously and IdeaM does the research and the synthesis — finding connections across everything and producing one coherent, structured outline of what matters.

When you create a new outline (rather than merging), the root gets an AI-generated introduction that summarizes everything below it, and chapter nodes get short introductions that preview their children — no empty headers. Node names stay concise (2–6 words) while the detail lives in each node’s content.

The merge behavior means you can keep building knowledge on a topic from many sources over time. If a merge produces bad results, the Unmerge button restores your outline to its exact pre-merge state.

Toolbar → 🧠 Second Brain menu, or Smart Tools → Ask Your Outlines

Your Second Brain is an always-present outline where you accumulate everything you want to remember — notes, research, ideas, articles, images, anything. It becomes a private, searchable library you can question in your own words.

Save any node (and everything under it) with a right-click → “Save to Second Brain”. Then query it two ways: a free, instant, offline keyword Search that filters your saves as you type, or Ask Second Brain, which sends your question to the AI and writes an answer across your saved content.

• Ask Your Outlines has three modes: the current outline, all your outlines at once, or just your Second Brain.
• Answers stream in word-by-word, and reference the specific sections they came from.
• Everything is based only on your own content — it never makes things up from outside your outlines.

Smart Tools menu → Summarize outline

Distill a whole outline down to its key points — a short, well-organized gist instead of every bullet. Perfect when a detailed capture has grown so many bullets that the main point gets buried.

1. 1Open Smart Tools → Summarize outline.
2. 2Pick how short you want it: Standard gist (key points with a little structure) or Brief (maximum compression).
3. 3Choose what to do with the result — Save as a new outline (the safe default, leaving your original untouched) or replace the current outline in place.
4. 4Review the preview (it shows how much it condensed), then create the summary.

Smart Tools menu → Transform outline with AI

Change an outline’s structure, length, or style on demand by describing what should change in plain English. Where Reformat rewrites the contents of one node, Reshape changes the shape of the outline itself — adding, removing, renaming, merging, splitting, or moving nodes.

1. 1Open Smart Tools → Transform outline with AI. With a node selected it works on that branch; with nothing selected, the whole outline.
2. 2Type how you want it changed — e.g. “reorganize alphabetically,” “merge small chapters into a Misc chapter,” “promote leaf nodes about X to top-level chapters.”
3. 3Click Preview. A Before/After tree shows color-coded changes (added, removed, renamed, moved) and a one-line count.
4. 4Click Apply to commit, tweak your instruction, or cancel. An auto-snapshot is written first, and Cmd+Z undoes it.

Settings → Professional Customization → Your Voice

Teach IdeaM how you write, then have it generate work that sounds like you instead of like generic AI. This is strictly your own voice — it never imitates anyone else. Your Voice is off by default; turn it on in Settings.

1. 1Paste a few things you’ve written — posts, emails, notes. A few hundred words is plenty. Or pull a sample straight from your Second Brain.
2. 2Click “Learn my voice.” The AI writes a short, plain-English voice profile describing your tone, formality, sentence rhythm, favorite words, and any emoji or hashtag habits.
3. 3The profile appears in an editable box, so you can see exactly what was learned and tweak it. Add more samples and regenerate anytime.
4. 4In the output wizards (Export Email, Summarize, social posts and more), tick “In my voice” and the result is written in your style.

Right-click a node → Generate Podcast

Turn a chapter into a narrated audio episode in real voices.

1. 1Right-click any node and choose Generate Podcast.
2. 2Configure it: style (Two-Host Discussion, Single Narrator, Interview, or Debate), voices, length (Brief, Standard, or Detailed), and quality.
3. 3Click Generate — the AI writes the script and synthesizes the audio.
4. 4Preview in the built-in player and read along with the script viewer, then save the MP3.

• Your podcast always records and is never silent. With your own OpenAI key you get natural AI voices; without one, it still records using your Mac’s built-in voices (free, offline, no key).
• On iPhone and iPad, keyless users get an audible two-voice podcast synthesized right on the device.

Desktop app → Turn Into (Export) menu → Generate Video

Turn a chapter into a finished, branded narrated slideshow video — great for posting to YouTube, sharing in a class, or dropping into a presentation. The video is built right on your Mac, so nothing is uploaded to a server.

• Customize the look: your own logo on every slide, an accent color, a dark or light theme, and slide visuals (auto-drawn mind maps, free public-domain photos, and moving video clips).
• Choose a narrator voice and how deep the video goes (Overview, Standard, Deep, or the full outline).
• It always narrates — with your OpenAI key you get natural AI voices; without one it uses your Mac’s built-in voice.
• A live progress bar shows exactly where the render is up to; the finished MP4 lands in your Documents · IdeaM Videos folder.

Desktop app → Turn Into (Export) menu → Slide Deck

Turn an outline into a branded slide deck — a real .pptx file that opens in both PowerPoint and Keynote (and Google Slides). Each chapter becomes a slide with a clear title and tidy bullets, styled with your brand look, so you can present straight away or fine-tune it in the app you already use.

When a section contains numbers — a small table or a list of figures — IdeaM automatically turns them into a clean chart on the slide, so your data shows up as a visual instead of a wall of digits.

• Opens natively in PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google Slides — no conversion, no lock-in.
• Your logo, accent color, and a light or dark theme on every slide.
• Numeric data is auto-charted; the rest becomes clean titles and bullets.
• Pick how deep the deck goes, then save the .pptx and present or edit it anywhere.

Smart Tools menu → Translate this section

Produce your work in 21 languages. Translate any node and its descendants into another language, with the same preview-and-approve safety as the other AI transforms. Formatting (headings, lists, bold, links) is preserved, and proper nouns and code stay as-is.

1. 1Select the node you want to translate (or the top of the outline for the whole thing).
2. 2Open Smart Tools → Translate this section and pick a target language.
3. 3Click Translate & preview — each node’s translation is shown side-by-side with the original.
4. 4Reject any you don’t want, then apply. Nodes you edited by hand are auto-skipped so translation never clobbers your edits.

Right-click a branch → Export Email (turn on Email tools in Settings first)

Turn any branch of your outline into a ready-to-send email. Sketch your thoughts as an outline, then let the AI shape them into a real message with a subject line and a readable body — greeting, flowing sentences, tidy bullets where they help, and a sign-off. IdeaM never sends email for you and never touches your inbox — you always review and hit send yourself.

1. 1Pick a tone — Friendly professional, Formal, or Casual — and optionally add a one-line instruction like “keep it short.”
2. 2Click Draft email. You get an editable preview — tweak the subject and body freely.
3. 3Send it four ways, no login needed: Open in Gmail, Open in Mail, Copy email, or Download a .eml file.

Right-click a branch → Share to Social (turn on Social export in Settings first)

Turn one idea into ready-to-post content for X, Instagram (branded square carousels), LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, and YouTube — each written to fit that network, and in your voice if Your Voice is on. IdeaM never posts anything for you and never connects to your accounts; you always review and post yourself.

• X — a thread (each post within 280 characters) or a single post.
• Instagram — branded 1080×1080 carousel images that match your video slides, plus a caption with hashtags.
• LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Bluesky — each a platform-appropriate post; Threads and Bluesky offer a one-click hand-off to their compose window.
• YouTube — a publish package (title options, description with chapter timestamps, tags, and a thumbnail idea) that pairs with Make a Video.

Settings → AI Provider, and Settings → Data & Privacy

Your thinking stays yours. IdeaM stores all your data locally on your device — your outlines are never uploaded for storage, and data is only sent to an AI service when you explicitly invoke an AI feature.

Run AI entirely on your own machine with local AI (Ollama / Google Gemma) — no API key, no cost, works offline. Or bring your own key for premium cloud models. Either way, you choose, and you can toggle AI data processing on or off anytime.

IdeaM runs natively on Mac, iPhone, and iPad, and instantly in any modern web browser — nothing to install. Your work goes with you.

The interface adapts to each device: full keyboard shortcuts and right-click menus on desktop, and touch-friendly tap-again, swipe, and long-press equivalents on iPhone and iPad.

Every AI draft of a factual output runs through an automatic quality check before you send or publish it — always on, nothing to switch on. Right after the AI writes an email draft, a social post, a summary, or an imported-email outline, a second pass re-reads it against the source it came from and looks for claims the source doesn’t actually support (invented names, numbers, dates, quotes, or facts).

If it spots any, it flags them right in the preview under a “Please review these” note, and can offer a corrected version you can accept or ignore. It never rewrites your draft silently — the final review is always yours. The check runs on the free on-device AI, so it costs nothing and never uses your monthly generations.

A planned capability, not yet available: unify your email and your physical mail into one AI-organized inbox — so everything that comes to you lands in a single, structured place that IdeaM helps you triage. This is in development; the rest of the guide describes what ships in IdeaM today.