An estimator, a conductor, and your own material.
Nothing here is a metaphor. This page is the actual mechanism, at the level of detail we would want if we were considering it.
Five steps, and you drive all of them.
Bring your material
A PDF, a DOCX, a pasted paper, or a chapter picked out of a book's own table of contents. Parsed in your browser.
Concept graph
Concepts and their prerequisites are extracted so you can see what Attune found in the material. This is an overview, not a filter: it does not decide what you are shown, and it is Attune's reading rather than a contents page the author wrote.
Verbatim study
Your chapter, whole, in its own order, a passage at a time. Nothing is selected, shortened or skipped, and no model runs while you read.
Attention loop
State is estimated twice a second and conducts the second channel: recede, dim, anchor, or offer an interval. A derived sample is recorded every two seconds.
Review, or erase
Look back at where you held and where you left. Delete the subject and its text and lessons go with it.
Six channels of signal, none of them content.
Attune never stores what you typed or what you looked at. It stores a state label and a confidence: the difference between a diary and a thermometer.
Thresholds are per device class, because a phone reader who is completely engaged trips a desktop threshold in about 8s simply by reading.
KeystrokesLive
Cadence only: count and interval, never characters.
PointerLive
Movement and rest. Long rest is a signal, not a verdict.
ScrollLive
Reading progress. How much of the document fits your screen is recorded alongside it, because silence means far less when there was nothing to scroll.
TouchLive
Taps and swipes, on their own thresholds rather than a desktop's.
VisibilityLive
A hidden tab is an observation, not an inference. The session stops guessing and stops sampling.
GazePrototype
Optional, consent-gated, computed on your machine. Frames are never uploaded and never stored. Not yet feeding the estimator.
Recede, occupy, or step out of the way.
Everything recedes. No dimming, no anchor, no lesson interrupted. The most important gesture is the one not made.
The passage dims and the prerequisite behind this concept surfaces as an anchor. An ambient bed would rise to occupy the circuit, and a read-along would point at the line. Both are still ahead of the build. Additive, never scolding.
An interval is offered rather than a nudge: a way out that doesn't read as failure, and a return primed from the concept you left.
Desktop thresholds shown, and validated on live sessions. Phone thresholds are provisional and marked as such in the product. See Research.
What the second channel can do, and what it doesn't yet.
Each carries the same status vocabulary as the ledger on the home page, so you never have to guess which of these you would actually get today.
SilenceLive
When flow is confirmed, everything recedes. Silence is a setting, not a failure, and it is the state the instrument tries hardest to protect.
Protects · on flow
AnchorConcept
The prerequisite behind the current concept, surfaced on drift to say where you are. It needs a current concept, and reading the text in the author's order does not have one, so it left the loop when selection did. Restoring it means locating concepts in the text without deciding what you see.
Orients · on drift
Ambient bedPrototype
A generated audio layer that occupies the wandering circuit instead of suppressing it. It shifts when you drift and recedes when flow returns.
Occupies · low demand
Read-alongConcept
A voice reading nominally alongside you, intermittent and always subordinate to the eye. It would arrive at drift moments as a pointing finger.
Directs · on drift
Two-voice dialogueConcept
Your own source worked through conversationally by two voices: the format human attention evolved to track passively, applied to the chapter in front of you.
Occupies · low demand
IntervalConcept
A break-and-return ritual: watch for fatigue, offer a guided exit, monitor recentering, prime re-entry through the material before the session resumes.
Recovers · on fatigue
The constraints are the product.
Teach you something your source didn't say
Confabulation in specialised study is trust-fatal. What you read is selected from your text or nothing is shown at all.
Send a camera frame anywhere
Gaze is computed on your device. There is no upload path, so there is nothing to promise about how we store them.
Reward you for time spent
No streaks, no badges, no daily goal. A shorter session that held is the better session.
Make itself necessary
The instrument works toward its own obsolescence. If you need it a year from now as much as you do today, it has failed.