AI for Google Docs - summarize, chat, and cite.
Sidenote is a browser extension (Chrome, Edge and Firefox) that reads your Google Docs and answers questions about them: summaries, plain-language explanations, chat. Every answer carries a citation that opens the exact source passage. Read-only, no admin install.
Read-only · One Google scope, no Drive access · No admin install
Work through the week-one checklist and open your first PR by Friday1. Your onboarding buddy, assigned on day one, will walk you through the codebase2.
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 summarize 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 Sidenote works on Google Docs.
Connect Google, read-only.
A one-time, read-only sign-in. No Workspace admin, no write access, no Drive scope. The viewer shows Google's own typeset PDF pages by capturing them through your signed-in session; nothing in your Drive is browsed, just the documents you open.
Open a Doc, ask a question.
With Sidenote in the side panel, open a Google Doc and ask. Summarize it, explain a dense section in plain English, or chat across every Doc you've opened.
Click a citation, see the passage.
Every claim is grounded in a quoted chunk of the document. Click the chip and Sidenote opens that passage and highlights it - no scrolling, no guessing.
Comparing several docs at once? Bundle them into a collection and ask one question across the lot - each citation names its source doc. Mostly after the one-click TL;DR? See the AI summarizer.
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.
“Summarize 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.
The narrowest access that does the job.
Sidenote uses read-only Google scopes: the required documents.readonly, which reads only the Doc you open, plus your email to identify your account. There is no Drive scope at all. The viewer shows Google's own typeset pages by capturing them through your signed-in browser session, the same file you get from the File, Download menu, so nothing in your Drive is touched. No Drive browsing or listing, 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 - your content stays scoped to your account. Anthropic and Voyage AI both run with no-training defaults on the API tiers we use; we never fine-tune models on user content.
Common questions about Sidenote for Google Docs.
Read any Doc. With citations.
Add Sidenote to your browser, connect Google read-only, open a Doc, and ask. No admin install. Free tier forever, opt-in 7-day Pro trial, no card required.
Read-only · One Google scope, no Drive access