Distil Reads Capture

Capture any web page (or a YouTube video's transcript) into your Distil Reads.

Distil Reads Capture — build your own newsfeed, from what you decide matters. Every feed you scroll was built by someone else. An algorithm picked the order, optimizing for time-on-site, and you got whatever held attention best. Distil Reads inverts that: you capture what's worth your time, you say how it ranks, and the feed you scroll is the one you built. This extension is how things get in. Find something worth reading — an article, a paper, a 40-minute talk — click the icon, tell it how much it matters, and it lands in your feed, summarized and sized to the time you'll actually have. WHAT IT CAPTURES • Any article or web page. The extension extracts the main content on the page itself — the article text, plus the title, author, site name, and lead image. • A text selection. Highlight a passage before you click and just that passage is captured, instead of the whole page. • YouTube videos. On a watch page, the extension pulls the video's transcript and captures that, so a 40-minute video becomes something you can read. YOU ARE THE ALGORITHM There's no engagement model deciding what surfaces. Three things do, and you set all three at capture time: • Priority — an Eisenhower 2x2 grid (Do First, Schedule, Quick, Backlog). This is the ranking function. What you marked urgent and important is what you see first, because you said so. • Occasions — the situation you'd want to read this in: commuting, lunch, deep-work hours, whatever you set up. Open the feed in the situation you're actually in and it shows only what fits. The right read finds you, instead of everything competing for you at once. • Expected reading time — 5, 15, or 30 minutes. The AI writes the full read to fill roughly that long, and a focus-mode timer paces you through it. You choose the depth; nothing is padded to keep you scrolling. Related material clusters together by topic, so a session on one subject stays on that subject instead of yanking you between six. WHAT HAPPENS NEXT In the Distil Reads web app, each capture becomes a Card: a short teaser (summary plus key points) you can skim, a full read written to your chosen length, and the original source content underneath. You highlight it, annotate it, tag it, and mark it Understood — or Not Quite, which puts it back on a spaced-repetition schedule so it resurfaces days later and actually sticks. That's the other inversion. A normal feed measures whether you kept scrolling. This one asks whether you understood, and what you didn't comes back until you do. No likes, no streaks, no engagement counters — it borrows the feeling of a scroll, not the mechanics. PRIVACY AND PERMISSIONS The extension is deliberately narrow about what it can touch: • No always-on content script and no broad site access. Nothing runs on any page until you click the toolbar icon; the extractor is then injected into that one tab, using the standard activeTab permission. • Page content is read in your browser and sent to your Distil Reads account. The server never fetches the page itself, so pages behind your login work the same as public ones. • The only host permission is distilreads.com, where your captures go. Nothing is sent anywhere else. • No separate extension login and no tokens to paste — the capture is authorized by the Distil Reads session you're already signed into. • Your feed is yours alone. Nothing you capture is shared, published, or visible to anyone else — there are no followers and no public posts. REQUIREMENTS A free Distil Reads account at https://distilreads.com. New accounts include 1000 free reads on our summarizer; after that you connect your own API key from a provider you choose (DeepSeek, Anthropic, Google, Groq, or OpenRouter), most of which have free tiers. Your key is stored encrypted and is never shown back to you. Support: support@distilreads.com