For Google Docs
AI for Google Docs — summarise, chat, and cite.
Sidenote is a Chrome extension that reads your Google Docs and answers questions about them — summaries, plain-language explanations, chat — with a citation on every answer that opens the exact source passage. Read-only, no admin install.
The problem
The answer is in the doc. Reading all of it isn't the job.
Proposals, briefs, contracts, meeting notes — the doc holds the answer, but finding it means scrolling past everything that isn't the answer. And when an AI does summarise it, you're left wondering which part it actually read.
Sidenote answers the question and shows its working: every claim links to the passage in the Doc that backs it. Trust, in one click.
How it works
How Sidenote works on Google Docs.
Comparing several docs at once? Bundle them into a Collection and ask one question across the lot — each citation names its source doc.
Use cases
What you ask a doc — and how Sidenote answers.
- “What did we promise in this proposal?”Sidenote reads the proposal and quotes the commitment — scope, price, timeline — with a link to the line it's written on.
- “What were the action items from these notes?”Long meeting-notes docs become a short list of owners and decisions, each cited back to where it was agreed.
- “Summarise this brief for me.”A TL;DR of a sprawling brief or PRD, with every claim linked to the section it came from — so you can trust the summary.
- “What does the contract say about termination?”Sidenote finds the clause that applies and quotes it verbatim, instead of you scrolling 14 pages of legalese.
- “Is this draft consistent with the spec?”Bundle the draft and the spec into a Collection and ask — Sidenote answers across both and cites each source doc.
- “What's the onboarding doc say about week one?”New hires ask the doc directly instead of pinging their manager, and get the answer with the passage to back it up.
Read-only by design
The narrowest access that does the job.
Sidenote asks for one Google scope — read-only access to Docs — plus your email to identify your account. No Drive picker, no Sheets, no Slides, no write access. A document is only ever read once you open it, and nothing is crawled in the background.
Your documents stay in your account. Content lives behind row-level security in our UK (eu-west-2) Supabase region — no two accounts can read each other's chunks. Anthropic and Voyage AI both run with no-training defaults on the API tiers we use; we never fine-tune models on user content.
FAQ
Common questions about Sidenote for Google Docs.
Does Sidenote need a Google Workspace admin to install anything?
No. You connect Google Docs yourself with a standard Google sign-in. There's nothing for a Workspace admin to deploy or approve org-wide — each person grants their own read-only access.
What access does Sidenote get to my Google account?
Read-only access to Google Docs documents (the documents.readonly scope) plus your email address to identify your account. That's it — no Drive browser, no Sheets, no Slides, no write access. Sidenote can only read a document once you open it.
Can it read my private Google Docs?
Yes — the documents you open, through your own signed-in session, read-only. If you can open the Doc, Sidenote can answer questions about it. If you can't, neither can Sidenote — permissions stay exactly where Google put them.
Is my document content used to train AI models?
No. Anthropic and Voyage AI both run with no-training defaults on the API tiers Sidenote uses, and Sidenote never fine-tunes models on user content. Your documents are used only to answer your own questions, stored in a UK (eu-west-2) region with row-level security isolating every account.
How is this different from Gemini in Google Workspace?
Gemini is Google's own AI, bundled into Workspace and tuned for Google's apps. Sidenote is a lightweight per-user extension that works across Google Docs and everything else you read — Confluence, Notion, PDFs, articles — and grounds every answer in a citation you can click straight to the source passage.
How do citations work for a Google Doc?
Sidenote ingests a clean, paragraph-anchored snapshot of the Doc. Each answer cites the passage it used; click a citation and Sidenote opens that passage in its viewer and highlights it — so you always see exactly what the answer was built on.
Try it on your docs
Read any Doc. With citations.
Add Sidenote to Chrome, connect Google read-only, open a Doc, and ask. No admin install. Free tier forever, 7-day Pro trial — no card required.
Read-only · documents.readonly scope only