The app

Calliope is a calm place to write a long thing — a novel, a memoir, a manuscript of any size — with a real AI companion beside you that never writes your prose for you. That last part is the whole design. The app helps you think, remember, and stay consistent; the sentences stay yours.

This section is a guide to the app itself. Read it top to bottom to learn what Calliope can do, or jump to the piece you need.

The shape of the app

Calliope has four surfaces, and they all point at one book — the same canon, whichever way you look at it.

• The editor — a distraction-free writing canvas set in book typography. This is where you spend your time. See The writing canvas.
• Structure — the outline of your book as parts and chapters, with word counts, targets, and statuses. See Structure: parts & chapters.
• The Map — Calliope’s model of your book’s world: the characters, places, and facts you’ve established, and where each is mentioned. See The Map.
• Marginalia — notes, to-dos, references, research, and chat threads that live beside the prose, anchored to the paragraph they belong to. See Marginalia.

Around those sit the AI companion, your goals and targets, export, and your account, credits, and billing.

A few ideas worth knowing first

Three words recur throughout Calliope. Learning them here makes the rest of the docs read easily.

• A fact is one thing in your story’s canon — a character, a place, an object, whatever you need to keep straight. Facts live on the Map. A mention is a place in your prose where a fact appears.
• Marginalia are annotations that sit next to your writing without touching it. Calliope calls each one a snippet.
• Credits are how AI usage is paid for, metered in euros. Reading and writing your book is free; the AI features that call Calliope’s own models spend credits. Nothing spends without telling you.

You can start without an account

Calliope is editor-first: open it and write immediately, with no sign-up wall. Your work lives in your browser until you decide to make an account and keep it. Getting started walks through that first session.