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Browse 31 short guides covering every screen of the iPhone app, the Apple Watch app, watch complications, and how on-device AI keeps your journal private.
Getting started
Welcome to Cairn
A 60-second tour of the privacy-first AI micro-journal — what it does, who it's for, and how the iPhone, Apple Watch, and on-device AI work together.
Recording your first entry
Raise your wrist, tap record, speak for up to 30 seconds. The watch transfers audio to your iPhone for on-device transcription and analysis.
Permissions explained
Microphone, Speech Recognition, HealthKit, Notifications, Calendar — what each permission unlocks and why Cairn never sends any of it off-device.
How context is added automatically
Heart rate, HRV and your calendar load are silently attached to every entry — giving future-you the full picture of how you actually felt.
iPhone app
Timeline
Your living journal: entries grouped by day, mood and energy color-coded, with biometric and place context inline. Tap any entry to open it in detail.
Entry detail
The full record of one moment: full transcription, AI mood analysis, heart rate and HRV trace, the original audio, and the keywords Cairn extracted.
Insights
AI-surfaced patterns drawn from your entries — what consistently lifts you, what drains you, and how your week has been trending.
Mental Landscape
An ambient, animated view of your inner state over time — mood and energy plotted as a living terrain you can scrub through week by week.
Cognitive Profile
How you tend to think and feel: the recurring themes, language patterns, and emotional signatures Cairn observes across all your entries.
Personal Signal
Your baseline — what 'normal' looks like for you. Cairn uses this to know when something is genuinely off, not just different from yesterday.
Ask Your Journal
A private chat over your own entries: ask why a week felt heavy, when you last slept well, or what triggered last month's slump. Answers stay on your device.
Monthly Report
An end-of-month narrative summary: themes, peaks and dips, biometric context, and the few sentences that actually capture how the month felt.
Year in Review
An annual recap, exportable as PDF: defining moments, mood arcs, the best and hardest weeks, and the questions you kept returning to.
Streak detail
How many days in a row you've journaled, your longest run, and the rhythm of your practice — with rest days treated kindly.
Pattern alerts
Optional gentle nudges when Cairn notices a recurring pattern — three rough mornings in a row, an unusually quiet week, or a sustained shift in HRV.
Apple Watch
Recording on Apple Watch
The fastest path from thought to entry: tap to record, watch the waveform, tap to stop. Audio is encoded as M4A and queued for transfer.
Haptic check-in
A wordless way to mark a moment when you can't speak. Two taps log the feeling, the time, and your current biometrics — text comes later.
Ritual recording
A guided morning or evening prompt sequence that runs entirely on the watch — a small daily ritual that builds a rich long-term record.
Scribble input
Don't want to talk? Use the watch's Scribble keyboard to write a short entry by hand. Cairn treats it the same as a voice entry.
Weekly dots
Seven dots, one per day of the past week, colored by your overall mood — a glance-able summary right on your wrist.
Streak on watch
A wrist-sized view of your current streak with a gentle nudge when you haven't logged today — without ever feeling like a chore.
Watch complications
Cairn Mood complication
Your current mood at a glance, designed for circular and rectangular watch face slots. Updates after every entry.
Cairn Streak complication
Your journaling streak as a watch face number — a quiet daily reminder of the practice you're building.
Cairn Energy complication
Your current energy level on the watch face — a small dial that mirrors what your last entries said about your bandwidth today.
Cairn Detail complication
Mood, energy and streak combined into one larger watch face slot — the whole picture in a single rectangular tile.
Cairn Week complication
Your mood week as seven small dots on the watch face — designed for the rectangular slot on Modular and Infograph faces.
Cairn corner complication
A minimal corner-slot complication for round watch faces, surfacing today's mood without taking up real estate.
AI & privacy
On-device AI (Apple Foundation Models)
How Cairn analyzes mood, energy and themes entirely on your iPhone using Apple's Foundation Models — no entries ever leave the device for analysis.
Cloud AI with your own key
Bring your own API key (OpenAI, Mistral) for deeper monthly analysis. The key lives in your Keychain and nothing is stored on Cairn's servers.
Managed AI (Pro)
Cairn Pro routes your deeper analyses through a managed Mistral relay — no key needed, end-to-end encrypted in transit, content never logged.
Privacy model
What stays on your devices, what goes through iCloud (encrypted, in your account), and what — if anything — Cairn ever sees. The honest version.