/prep and /interview, Socratic questioning is always active.
Selah uses extended thinking before responding — taking a moment to reason through your question, weigh the conversation context, and consider your notes before it speaks. This means responses are more considered and better connected to what you’ve been studying.
Starting a conversation
Open Companion from the sidebar. The input field is at the bottom of the screen. Type anything and press Enter (or tap Send) to begin. Selah responds with full context from your study history. To start a fresh conversation at any time, click + New Chat in the top bar.Using the companion from the note editor
You can also open the Companion directly inside any note without leaving the editor. PressCmd+. / Ctrl+. or click the sage-green chat button in the bottom-right corner. A companion dock appears alongside your note — as a side panel on wide screens, a bottom sheet on narrow screens, or a floating window you can drag around. The dock has the current note pre-loaded as context, so the Companion can answer questions specific to what you’re writing. Your conversation persists as you navigate between notes.
Slash commands
Type/ at the start of your message to trigger a structured mode. Each command changes how the Companion responds for that session.
/prep [topic] — Sermon and teaching preparation
/prep [topic] — Sermon and teaching preparation
Starts a guided interview to help you prepare a sermon, Bible study, or devotional. The Companion asks you structured questions about your passage, your main point, your audience, personal stories, and how you plan to open. You answer in your own words — the AI listens, asks follow-ups, and builds context from your knowledge base.After enough exchanges, a “Build your message” card appears. See The prep workflow below for what happens next.Example:
/prep John 15 — the vine and branches/interview [topic] — Socratic deep-dive
/interview [topic] — Socratic deep-dive
Starts a Socratic interview on any topic or passage. The Companion asks one focused question per turn, helping you develop your thinking through dialogue rather than direct answers. When you wrap up, the conversation is saved as a full, editable interview note — your insights, verbatim quotes, scripture connections, and open questions, all in a TipTap document you can keep developing.Example:
/interview What does Paul mean by "the righteousness of God" in Romans?/pray [request] — Save a prayer request
/pray [request] — Save a prayer request
Saves your prayer request to the Prayer Board immediately, without a back-and-forth conversation. Use this when you want to log something quickly.Example:
/pray for clarity on next week's teaching/reflect — Weekly themes from your captures
/reflect — Weekly themes from your captures
Analyzes your captures from the last seven days and surfaces the recurring themes, questions, and patterns in what you’ve been thinking about. Useful for weekly review and sermon planning — it shows you what has been occupying your mind without you having to scroll back through everything.
Editing notes through conversation
You can ask the Companion to edit your notes directly — no need to leave the conversation and open the editor. Describe what you want changed in plain language, and the Companion makes the edit for you. This works from both the web companion and Telegram.What you can ask
- Append content — “Add a point about Romans 8 to my sermon prep note”
- Update a section — “Tighten up the intro on my grace teaching note”
- Undo an edit — “Undo that last change” or “Revert the edit you just made”
Every AI edit is logged with a before-and-after snapshot and a plain-English diff summary (e.g., “Added 2 paragraphs to Introduction”). You can undo any edit instantly — see undo AI edits for details.
How note resolution works
When you reference a note by name or topic, the Companion resolves it using title matching and semantic similarity against your notes. If a single clear match is found, it proceeds. If the match is ambiguous, the Companion asks which note you meant. If no match is found, it lets you know and suggests creating a new note instead.Edit cards
When the Companion edits a note, an edit card appears in the chat thread below the message that triggered the change. The card shows what happened — for example, “Appended 3 blocks” or “Updated ‘Conclusion’ section.” It auto-expands briefly after the edit lands, then collapses to a one-line pill. Hover over a collapsed card to expand it again. Each card has two actions:- Show — scrolls the note editor to the affected blocks and re-triggers the gold highlight so you can see exactly what changed.
- View change — opens a diff preview showing the note before and after the edit, with options to undo or re-apply.
Diff preview
Click View change on any edit card to open a side-by-side comparison of your note before and after the AI edit. On wide screens the panels sit next to each other; on narrow screens they stack vertically. From the diff preview you can:- Undo — reverts the edit and restores the previous content.
- Re-apply — re-applies a previously undone edit.
- Close — dismisses the preview without changing anything.
Esc or click outside the modal to close it.
Conflict resolution
If the Companion tries to edit your note while you’re actively typing, a version conflict can occur. Instead of failing silently, a banner appears in the chat:“I started to add a section, but you were editing. Want me to try again?”Click Try again to re-apply the edit against the current version of your note, or Skip to dismiss the banner and discard that edit. If “Try again” still can’t apply cleanly — for example, if you renamed the heading the Companion was targeting — an error message appears explaining what happened.
Attaching captures and notes
You can give the Companion specific context by attaching captures or notes to any message.Open the attachment picker
Click the paperclip icon to the left of the input field. A panel slides up with two tabs: Captures and Notes.
Select what to include
Check one or more items. Selected items appear as pills above the input — you can remove any of them before sending.
You can attach both captures and notes in the same message. The picker closes automatically when you start typing.
Session history
Every conversation is saved. To revisit a past session, click the History button (clock icon with label) in the top bar. A panel slides down showing your recent conversations, each labeled with its auto-generated topic and timestamp. Click any session to load it. Sessions work across surfaces — conversations you start on the web and Telegram all appear in the same history. A session automatically closes after 30 minutes of inactivity; the next message starts a fresh one.Deep linking to a session
You can link directly to any conversation by adding asessionId parameter to the URL:
The Telegram
/sessions command uses these deep links to let you tap a conversation in Telegram and continue it on the web.The prep workflow
/prep is Selah’s most structured mode, designed for preparing sermons and teachings. Here’s how the full workflow unfolds:
Start the interview
Type
/prep [your topic] and send. The Companion enters prep mode and begins asking you questions: what passage you’re working from, the one thing you want people to walk away with, personal stories or experiences that connect to the material, your audience type, and how you’re planning to open.Have the conversation
Answer each question in your own words. The Companion asks follow-ups, pushes for specifics and concrete details, and uses your captures and notes as background context. There’s no minimum length — say as much or as little as feels right for each question.
Build your message
After at least 8 exchanges, a “Ready to build your message?” card appears in the conversation. You’ll see two options:
- Enrich + Format — Organizes your words into a structured teaching note, then adds inline research blocks: historical context, original language notes (Greek/Hebrew), cross-references, cultural background, and notes on where your illustrations fit. Your words are never changed — only surrounded by additional context.
- Just Format — Organizes and formats your content without adding any research enrichment.
The Companion matches the output’s reading level and style to how you spoke during the interview — so the finished note sounds like you, not like a generic outline.
Proactive check-ins
When you connect Telegram, Selah can send you brief, unprompted nudges throughout the day — a follow-up on something you read this morning, a gentle invitation to pause, or a question about a pattern it’s noticing in your captures. These arrive as plain-text Telegram messages designed to feel like a friend walking alongside you, not a notification. Check-ins lean toward discipleship — heart, practice, and walking-it-out — rather than “organize your notes.” A smaller share still surfaces stalled notes or unprayed captures when that’s genuinely what you need. Check-ins are evaluated every 15 minutes during your active hours. Selah reviews your recent activity — devotional completions, prayers, captures, notes, and patterns across them — and decides whether something is worth surfacing. If nothing needs attention, it stays quiet. You receive at most two nudges per day.What Selah checks for
Selah’s default mix leans about 60% formation, 25% study and organization, and 15% trivia or context. Within that mix, it looks for: Formation (most of the time):- Application follow-ups — a gentle check-in 24–48 hours after a devotional or a prayer you marked, asking how it’s landing in your day rather than whether you remember it.
- Heart patterns — when captures or prayers show a recurring theme (anxiety, grief, gratitude, a person on your mind), Selah names it gently and invites a heart move: gratitude, lament, or intercession.
- Practice rhythms — if it’s been a week without a prayer, a capture, or a devotional, a soft invitation to pause. Never a guilt trip.
- Meditation invitations — an offer to sit with a passage you’re already studying for a few minutes.
- Shepherd questions — occasional open-ended prompts like “what from your study this week is actually changing how you live?” Once every week or two at most.
- Silence invitations — sometimes a nudge is simply “sitting with you in this.” Selah treats silence as a feature.
- Stalled notes — a note you edited recently that hasn’t moved forward. Selah asks if anything is missing or if you’re ready to develop it further.
- Unprayed captures — a thought you captured that mentions something prayer-worthy but hasn’t been added to your prayer board. Selah suggests it gently.
- Thematic connections — a link between your recent captures, notes, and this week’s devotional theme, surfaced as a question.
- Occasionally — at most once a week — a one-sentence historical or contextual note about a passage you’re actively studying.
Post-devotional cooldown
After a devotional is delivered or saved, Selah stays quiet for about four hours. Receiving time deserves space — a morning reading shouldn’t be followed by a “your notes are clustering” nudge thirty minutes later. The cooldown anchors on the strongest available signal that you engaged with the devotional (saved the entry, opened it on the web, or received it in Telegram) and applies whether you’re on web or Telegram. The weekly reflection nudge (below) is the one exception — it’s meant to arrive alongside your reflection-day devotional.Weekly reflection nudge
On your configured reflection day — Friday by default — Selah sends a single reflection-framed check-in if you haven’t written a reflection yet for the week. Something like:Looking back at the week — where did you see grace? Where did you struggle?This fires once per week, respects your active hours, and bypasses the post-devotional cooldown so it can arrive on the same day as your reflection-day devotional.
First-nudge onboarding
The very first check-in you ever receive is a one-liner that explains how the relationship works — for example:I’ll check in about once a day during your active hours. Tell me anytime if the tone’s off — “more rest, less notes” or anything like it — and I’ll adjust.This intro nudge fires once per account. From there, normal check-ins begin.
Customizing check-in behavior
You can reshape what Selah checks for by telling it in conversation. Send a message in Telegram or the web companion like:- “Stop asking about my notes so much”
- “More rest, less study”
- “Focus on prayer connections and devotional themes”
- “Update my heartbeat instructions to only check for thematic connections”
Configuring check-in settings
Go to Settings and find the Proactive check-ins card under the Companion section. You can:- Toggle check-ins on or off — changes take effect on the next evaluation cycle.
- Set active hours — choose the window when Selah is allowed to send nudges (default: 8 AM to 10 PM). Overnight windows like 10 PM to 6 AM are supported.
- See your current instructions — a preview of the checklist Selah is working from appears inline with an example of how to tune it in conversation.
Proactive check-ins require a connected Telegram account. If Telegram isn’t linked yet, the settings card shows a prompt to connect it first. When you first connect Telegram, check-ins are enabled automatically with default settings.
Replying to a nudge
When you reply to a check-in message in Telegram, Selah picks up the conversation naturally. The nudge and your reply share the same session context, so the companion knows exactly what it asked and can continue the thread. You can also ignore any nudge — there’s no obligation to respond.Daily devotionals
Each morning, a daily devotional appears in your Companion feed. It includes a scripture reference, a brief reflection, a prayer prompt, and a question to carry into your day. Devotionals follow a weekly arc — the week opens with a theme, develops through the middle days, and closes with a reflection on your configured closing day. They’re generated from your study context so they’re connected to what you’ve been studying, not generic. Devotionals also arrive through the Telegram bot if you have it connected.Asking for today’s devotional on demand
You don’t have to wait for your scheduled delivery time. Ask the Companion for the devotional in plain language and it will deliver it to you right where you are:- “Can you give me today’s devotional?”
- “Send me today’s reflection”
- “What was yesterday’s devotional?”
- “Pull up the devotional from April 19”
- On Telegram, the devotional is pushed inline into your current chat so you can start reading immediately. If it had already been sent earlier in the day, the Companion tells you it’s above rather than re-sending the same entry.
- On the web, the Companion points you to your devotional page where the entry is ready to read.
Asking about your current theme
You can ask the Companion what this week’s devotional theme is at any time — just say something like “what’s this week’s theme?” or “what am I studying this week?” The Companion knows your current theme regardless of how it was set: automatically at the start of the week, through a theme pivot, or carried over from a previous week. It responds with the theme name, scripture anchor, and a brief summary.Changing your weekly theme
You don’t have to wait for the week to end to switch topics. If your study focus shifts or you want to explore something new, tell the Companion and it will pivot the week’s theme for you. Say something like:- “Let’s switch to a theme on resting in God’s sovereignty”
- “I want to spend the rest of the week on 2 Peter 1:5 — being a man of excellence”
- “New theme — start fresh on the cost of discipleship”
Theme pivots apply to the current week only. When your weekly closing day arrives, the normal reflection and next-week proposal process resumes as usual.
How Selah learns over time
Selah continuously learns from your activity to keep conversations and check-ins relevant. Each night, it reviews what you’ve been working on — notes you’ve edited, captures you’ve saved, prayers you’ve updated, and how you’ve engaged with devotionals. From this activity, it extracts patterns like “actively studying Romans” or “preparing a teaching on grace.” Over time, facts that are no longer reinforced by your activity fade naturally. If you haven’t touched a topic in weeks, Selah stops referencing it. This means the companion stays current with where you are in your studies rather than holding onto outdated context. This learning happens automatically — there’s nothing to configure. It applies to both your conversations and your proactive check-ins.What Selah remembers
Beyond short-term activity, Selah keeps a small memory of durable facts about you that persist across sessions. After each session, it extracts atomic facts in five categories:- Study style — how you like to engage with a passage (for example, “prefers narrative arc over outline”).
- Theology — convictions you’ve expressed (for example, “views grace as empowerment rather than permission”).
- Life context — what’s currently happening around your study (for example, “preparing for a wedding sermon in May”).
- Preferences — small things that shape the conversation (for example, “prefers shorter devotionals on weekdays”).
- Observations — patterns Selah has noticed across your captures and prayers (for example, “recurring theme of anxiety this month”).
Memory facts are screened for prompt-injection patterns before they’re stored. If a suspicious phrasing slips through extraction (for example, instructions disguised as a study note), the fact is flagged and excluded from every place it could reach the Companion. Flagged facts are kept for review rather than dropped, so a real reflection isn’t silently discarded.