Trip Story

Your trip, written in your own words — by an AI that only knows what you told it.

Trip Story turns a trip you have already logged in Notata into a short, first-person narrative, grounded entirely in what you actually recorded: your notes, the places you marked, the dates, the weather, and the names of nearby landmarks.

Does it make things up?

No — and that constraint is built into how it is asked to write, not left to chance. Most AI writing tools are free to embellish, which is exactly what makes them useless for a record of your own life: a paragraph that invents a conversation you never had is worse than no paragraph at all. Trip Story works under four hard rules:

• It may only assert what your data supports. Every sentence has to be derivable from your moment notes, place names, dates, weather, or the name of a nearby landmark. Nothing else is in scope.
• No invented specifics — ever. No invented names of people, no invented dialogue, and no emotional states you didn’t write down yourself. It cannot decide you felt moved by a view unless your note says so.
• Your notes outrank everything, including the data. If your note says it rained all day and the weather service says partly cloudy, the story goes with the rain. You were there; the API wasn’t.
• Thin facts mean fewer words, not more. Where there is little to go on, a section stays short rather than being padded out. Silence is a legitimate answer.

The same discipline governs people and places. If you traveled with someone, the story says “we” only when your own note names that person. History and geography appear only where they follow from your trip’s own facts, plus at most one sentence of common-knowledge context for a genuinely well-known landmark.

How it works

1. Open a trip, tap the trip menu, and choose Trip Story.
2. A consent screen shows exactly what will be sent before anything happens — trip notes, place names, dates, weather, and nearby landmark names. No photos ever leave your device.
3. Generation happens on demand only, with a live timer and a Cancel button. Larger trips can take a few minutes.
4. Your finished story is illustrated with your own favorited photos, entirely on-device.

Once it’s written

• Stories are cached on your phone. If you add to the trip later, Notata flags that the story is out of date, with one tap to update it — or Rewrite to start fresh.
• Share as PDF turns the story and its photos into a PDF you can send to anyone. They don’t need Notata to read it.

What is sent, and to whom

Generating a story sends that trip’s notes, place names, dates, weather, and nearby landmark names to Anthropic, the makers of Claude. Your photos are never included. It happens only when you ask for it, only after the consent screen, and nothing is retained off your phone by us afterwards — the finished story is cached on your device.

A note on the beta

Trip Story is in beta, and the arrangement is worth stating plainly: for now it calls Claude directly using an Anthropic API key you paste in once, held in your device’s keychain and excluded from backups. That means you need your own key to use this one feature, and those requests are governed by Anthropic’s own terms. A hosted version that removes the need for a key entirely is in progress, and this page will be updated before it ships.

Everything else in Notata — capture, trips, the map, the Lifeline, the Watch app, slideshows, and sharing — works with no key and no account. See the FAQ or the privacy policy for the full picture, or email support@getnotata.com.