What did we decide about the contractor last time?
Backstory retrieves:
- The relevant conversation
- The earlier decision
- What changed afterward
- The original messages supporting the answer
Your AI doesn’t need everything. It needs the right context.
Backstory is a Mac app that organizes your connected history and retrieves the context your AI needs to answer better.
Backstory keeps your broader history organized on your Mac, then retrieves the relevant, source-linked evidence for the question being asked.
Backstory keeps the broader eligible history local. Your AI receives only the context it needs.
Review the context Backstory prepared, inspect the original sources, and stay in control of what enters the conversation.
Ask without rebuilding the story.
Example answer
You agreed to revisit the plan after the inspection. The issue came up again twice afterward, but no later decision replaced the original one.
View supporting messages
How Backstory finds what matters
Backstory evaluates the question against signals like who was involved, what was being discussed, when events happened, and where the evidence came from.
It combines those signals to return a focused set of relevant results—not everything that happens to look related.
How Backstory works
Your history becomes useful without becoming another job.
1. Connect your history
Start with Apple Messages. Free prepares a rolling 90-day history for manual, local use. Paid expands that boundary to the full available supported history.
2. Organize and retrieve what matters
Paid keeps supported history maintained while Backstory is active and organizes the people, topics, dates, conversations, and sources that make your history useful.
3. Get answers faster with fewer prompts
Stop searching, summarizing, and pasting.
Get the answers you’re looking for—with context, not endless conversation.
4. Verify the answer
Inspect the provenance, original sources, and supporting evidence behind the context Backstory retrieved.
You control the handoff.
Backstory maintains your broader history on your Mac, while supported AI tools receive only the retrieved context for the question being asked. You can inspect the supporting evidence and original sources behind important details and conclusions.
The full story changes the answer.
A single message may explain what happened.
Backstory can retrieve and connect the relevant evidence across conversations and time—revealing what led to it, whether it has happened before, what you previously decided, and what changed afterward.
Remember the decision
Recover what you decided, why you decided it, and the conversations that led there.
Recognize the pattern
Connect related moments across different conversations and points in time.
Understand what changed
Compare what people said, expected, or agreed to with what happened later.
Trace the answer
Use source identifiers and local provenance to inspect the eligible message records supporting an important detail or conclusion.
One Backstory. Multiple AI tools.
Backstory is not another chatbot. Supported AI clients can request relevant, source-grounded context from your maintained Backstory when you ask a question.
For supported tools, this connection uses MCP.
Paid maintains supported history while Backstory is active and adds the supported connected experience. Free remains manual and local.
Each question receives focused context from the same maintained Backstory—without another round of searching and pasting.