Ask Your Journal Anything

"What was I stressed about last spring?"

Try answering that from a paper diary. It's an evening of squinting at your own handwriting, getting distracted by an entry about a barbecue, and giving up somewhere around April. Your journal knew the answer the whole time. It just had no way to tell you.

Now it does. Ask Hearth that question and it answers — the actual worries, from the actual entries, with the actual dates. Last spring it was the lease, the wedding toast, and whether the weird noise in the car was expensive. (It was.)

A journal that remembers

In the app, this is Inkling's memory. You write like always, and when you want to look back, you ask instead of scroll. What did I say about the new job in my first month? When did I last feel like this? Whatever happened with the noisy upstairs neighbor?

Years of your own thinking, finally answerable. Past you turns out to have known a lot; there was just never a way to ask them anything.

Every plan gets this — the free tier includes five AI reflections a day, which is plenty for "help me see the pattern" without turning your journal into a chatbot. It's a diary that happens to remember, not the other way around.

Ask from ChatGPT or Claude

On paid plans it goes a step further: you can connect Hearth to your own AI assistant. Mid-conversation with ChatGPT or Claude — planning your week, untangling a decision — you can ask, "check my journal: how did I actually feel after the last time I moved cities?" and the answer comes from your entries, right there in the chat.

Your journal stops being a place you visit and starts being something your other tools can consult. When you say so, and only when you say so.

The fine print, said out loud

Two things you should know before you ask, because we'd rather over-tell you than surprise you.

First: what your assistant reads goes into your assistant's history. When ChatGPT or Claude pulls an answer from your journal, that answer now lives in your conversation with them, under their retention and settings, not ours. On our side the reading is transient — entries are decrypted only in the moment, nothing readable is stored or logged, no one trains on it — every glance burns after reading, and our own tests enforce it. (The full machinery is here.) But we can't reach into your ChatGPT history and make it forget. So route the questions you're comfortable having in that provider's logs, and keep the rest for the app. This is the honest cost of the feature, and it's yours to spend or not.

Second: sealed letters stay sealed. If you've written a Future Me letter that opens next June, no question can pry it open early. Not from you, not through Inkling, not through the connector. A sealed letter has one opening date, and cleverness is not an accepted key.

And if you'd rather your journal kept quiet

Some people read all this and think: I don't want a journal that answers questions. I want a vault. Fair — that's a setting, and it's free. Flip on Private Vault and Hearth becomes cryptographically unable to read your entries, which means the AI can't either. No memory, no connector, no exceptions. The feature only exists where you've allowed it to.

But if you've ever wished you could sit your old journals down and ask what they've noticed about you — that's a real thing now. Ask about last spring. Past you has been waiting to be useful.