Start screen
The Start screen is your account-wide home, not tied to any one workspace. See news from all your workspaces in one place, ask a question right away, or start a new note.
Open the Start screen with Start in the navigation rail or the logo at the top of the rail. Right after you sign in, the Agent screen opens first, not Start.
What’s on the screen
Section titled “What’s on the screen”From top to bottom, the Start screen shows:
- Greeting: a time-of-day greeting with your name.
- Recent digests by workspace: AI Cortex digests and today’s activity count.
- Agent box: type a question to jump to the Agent screen and get an answer right away.
- Quick start: buttons to connect an assistant, make notes from a photo or PDF, and use templates.
- Recent notes: notes you’ve recently viewed or edited.
Recent digests by workspace
Section titled “Recent digests by workspace”Below the greeting, news from your AI Cortex appears next to a CORTEX label.
If AI Cortex is on in at least one workspace, Recent digests by workspace lists one line per workspace with its latest digest. If you logged activity today, a per-source count such as “Logged 3 entries from Claude · 1 entry from GitHub today” appears in front of the header.
- Select an item to switch to that workspace and open AI Cortex.
- If nothing has been organized yet, you see
Nothing organized yet. - If the last digest is two or more days old, an
n days oldchip appears. - If the latest run failed, a
Quota exceededorOrganize failedchip appears.
If AI Cortex isn’t on in any workspace, you see only a line with today’s activity count and a View in My Mash link. If nothing was logged today, it says No activity logged yet today. New accounts with no logged activity at all don’t see this line.
For AI Cortex settings and documents, see AI Cortex. For logged activity, see Activity and My Mash.
Ask the agent right away
Section titled “Ask the agent right away”Type a question in the Ask the agent... box and press Enter. You go to the Agent screen, a new chat is created, and the answer starts right away. To add a line break, press Shift+Enter.
Use the button at the bottom-left of the box to choose a Search scope. The default is Web.
| Search scope | Description |
|---|---|
| Web + Tasks | Uses the web together with your AI Cortex |
| Web | Searches the entire web |
| Tasks | Uses only your AI Cortex (your auto-organized wiki) |
Tasks and Web + Tasks need AI Cortex turned on in the current workspace, and chats started with these scopes can’t be shared with the workspace. For details, see Agent.
Quick start
Section titled “Quick start”The Quick start row below the box has four buttons.
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| Connect assistant | Opens the Integrations tab in Personal settings so you can connect AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude. AI tool connection |
| Photo → note | Takes you to the Notes screen. Use Start from an image on the empty Notes screen to turn the text in a photo into a note. Image and PDF import |
| PDF → note | Pick a PDF file to create and open a new note right there. |
| Templates | Pick Business plan or Meeting minutes to create and open a structured note. Template text is in Korean, even in the English UI. Templates |
A note made with PDF → note works like this:
- Up to the first 10 pages of the PDF are imported. You can pick a file of up to 100MB.
- Text is extracted automatically from the first page only. The remaining pages come in as image blocks.
- To turn the remaining pages into text too, select Extract text on each image. The note also includes a paragraph with this tip, written in Korean (“나머지 페이지도 텍스트로 바꾸려면, 각 이미지 위에서 텍스트 추출을 눌러주세요.” — “To turn the remaining pages into text, press 텍스트 추출 (Extract text) on each image.”), even in the English UI.
- Text extraction counts toward the workspace’s AI usage.
Recent notes
Section titled “Recent notes”Shows up to five notes you’ve recently viewed or edited, across all your workspaces. Notes you recently opened on this device come first, and each note shows its workspace name and when it was last edited. Select an item to open the note.
If you have no notes yet, this list doesn’t appear.
Stays the same when you switch workspaces
Section titled “Stays the same when you switch workspaces”The Start screen is an account-level screen, so switching workspaces in the account menu doesn’t change it. To learn how to switch workspaces, see Navigation tour.