Is there a journal app that remembers the people you write about?

Verified against Everglow 1.5 on 10 October 2026.

How someone gets a page

As you write, the AI engine you chose reads each entry for the names of people, places and things. A new name is only noticed at first: it appears in the World tab with a count of the entries it comes up in.

• Once a name has come up in 3 entries, Everglow remembers it and writes its page. You can set this anywhere from 2 to 5 in Settings, under Memory › Remember a name.
• To remember someone sooner, tap Remember on the card of names noticed lately in World, or in the ⋯ menu beside the name.
• Skip on that card, or Stop noticing, sets a name aside. Nothing is deleted, and the “set aside” link at the bottom of World brings it back.
• Noticing names needs an AI engine: on-device, your own API key or Everglow Cloud. If you write without AI, no pages are built.

What a person’s page holds

• A short summary the AI writes from the passages of your recent entries that name them, with how many entries mention them and the dates of the first and the last.
• What the archive knows: the facts your entries state about them. Show all lists every fact, grouped under where they live, work, relationships, preferences and traits, life events and other.
• Where each fact came from. Facts are marked Inferred until you confirm them, then Known. Tap a fact to see the sentence from your journal it was drawn from; up to three of these quotes also appear under “in your own words”, each with the date of its entry.
• Relationships, such as sibling or coworker, listed apart from “Often mentioned with”, the people who simply appear in the same entries.
• Every mention: each entry or companion chat that names them, which opens the original when you tap it.
• Your tone when writing about them over the last 90 days. It describes your writing, not the person.

When something changes

Everglow doesn’t overwrite what it has recorded. When a later entry gives a new value, such as a new city or a new job, it is added beside the old one, so after a move you may see both until you delete or edit the one that no longer holds.

• A value that was folded into a newer, more detailed one is shown under it as “previously”.
• A short-lived state, such as an illness, moves under “earlier” 30 days after it was last recorded.
• Pinned and edited facts stay current. Confirming a fact marks it Known, but a short-lived one still moves to “earlier” when its time has passed.

Correcting it

Press and hold a fact to change it. Most other actions are in the ⋯ menu at the top of a person’s page. None of them edit the text of your entries.

When it isn’t sure who someone is

A nickname or a short form can mean someone already in your journal. When the rest of your journal makes clear which person is meant, Everglow decides. When it doesn’t, and a separate check finds the new name could plausibly refer to someone you know, it asks. The question waits under the bell on the Journal tab and asks whether the new name is the same person you’ve mentioned before. Pick a name to merge them, choose Someone new to keep them apart, or choose Skip · I’ll come back to this.

One limit: a close spelling of a single name it already knows, such as a typo, or Alex when it only knows Alexander, is counted as that person without asking.

Relationships and the map

The Graph tab, marked Beta in 1.5, draws the people, places and things in your journal and the relationships between them. Relationship types come from a fixed list that includes friend, sibling, spouse, coworker, manages and works at.

• Each relationship says where it came from: read from your journal, inferred by the app, or set by you. Its detail sheet shows the sentence behind it and the entries it comes from.
• Being written about together is not treated as a relationship. Such pairs can be shown as faint “possible connections”, and their sheet says how many entries they share and “That is not a relationship.”
• When an entry says a relationship ended, a second check reads that entry before anything changes. The relationship is then kept as ended, with the date and the sentence, and drawn as a dotted line when nothing current connects the pair.
• A relationship last mentioned more than a year ago shows “last stated” and that date instead of reading as current.
• You can add a relationship, change its type, confirm it, mark it as ended, restore it, or mark two people as not related. Delete lasts only until an entry states the relationship again; Not related is remembered, so reading your entries again won’t bring it back.
• A time slider shows the map as it stood at an earlier date, and the map can also be read as a list.

How the companion and Ask use it

• When you name a remembered person in a chat, the companion is given their summary and their facts, with earlier values marked as earlier.
• Phrases such as “my sister” or “my boss”, recognized in English and Chinese, find the right person when your journal states that relationship. If one could mean more than one person, the companion is told to ask which.
• Ask answers from your original entries and shows them as dated sources. It doesn’t use the AI-written summaries as evidence. When a question names a remembered person, Ask also considers entries about the people most often written about with them.

Limits

• It works only from your writing. Someone you never name has no page, and a relationship the app infers rather than reads in an entry is labeled as inferred.
• Inferences can be wrong. That is why facts start as Inferred and show the sentence they came from, so you can check them against the entry.
• The AI-written summary under a name can misread you. Regenerate narrative in the ⋯ menu rewrites it.
• Building pages uses your chosen engine. With on-device AI the work stays on your iPhone; with your own API key or Everglow Cloud, the text a request needs goes to that provider.

Read more

• What an AI journal does, and what it doesn’t
• Where your writing goes with each AI engine
• Running the AI on your iPhone