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Welcome to Cairn

A 60-second tour of the privacy-first AI micro-journal — what it does, who it's for, and how the iPhone, Apple Watch, and on-device AI work together.

Recording your first entry

Raise your wrist, tap record, speak for up to 30 seconds. The watch transfers audio to your iPhone for on-device transcription and analysis.

Permissions explained

Microphone, Speech Recognition, HealthKit, Notifications, Calendar — what each permission unlocks and why Cairn never sends any of it off-device.

How context is added automatically

Heart rate, HRV and your calendar load are silently attached to every entry — giving future-you the full picture of how you actually felt.

Timeline

Your living journal: entries grouped by day, mood and energy color-coded, with biometric and place context inline. Tap any entry to open it in detail.

Entry detail

The full record of one moment: full transcription, AI mood analysis, heart rate and HRV trace, the original audio, and the keywords Cairn extracted.

Insights

AI-surfaced patterns drawn from your entries — what consistently lifts you, what drains you, and how your week has been trending.

Your Week

A weekly view of your autonomic load — how your heart-rate variability moved against your own 14-day baseline, with recovery moments linked back to what you recorded on your calmest days.

Cognitive Profile

How you tend to think and feel: the recurring themes, language patterns, and emotional signatures Cairn observes across all your entries.

Personal Signals

Up to five things that matter to you, named by you. Cairn watches for them in your entries and shows how often each one came up this week.

Ask Your Journal

A private chat over your own entries: ask why a week felt heavy, when you last slept well, or what triggered last month's slump. Answered on your device by default; nothing goes to a cloud provider unless you turn that on.

Monthly Report

An end-of-month narrative summary: themes, peaks and dips, biometric context, and the few sentences that actually capture how the month felt.

Year in Review

An annual recap, exportable as PDF: defining moments, mood arcs, the best and hardest weeks, and the questions you kept returning to.

Streak detail

How many days in a row you've journaled, your longest run, and the rhythm of your practice — with rest days treated kindly.

Pattern alerts

Optional gentle nudges when Cairn notices a recurring pattern — three rough mornings in a row, an unusually quiet week, or a sustained shift in HRV.

Pattern Warning

A look forward rather than back: once Cairn has enough history, it learns what tends to come before your harder days and tells you in the morning when today looks like one of them.

Recording on Apple Watch

The fastest path from thought to entry: tap to record, watch the waveform, tap to stop. Audio is encoded as M4A and queued for transfer.

Haptic check-in

A silent check-in for when you can't speak: tap a glyph, then turn the Digital Crown to set your energy from 1 to 5, and tap Done. It's logged straight to your timeline — no talking, no transcript.

Ritual recording

A guided morning or evening prompt sequence that runs entirely on the watch — a small daily ritual that builds a rich long-term record.

Scribble input

Don't want to talk? Use the watch's Scribble keyboard to write a short entry by hand. Cairn treats it the same as a voice entry.

Weekly dots

Seven dots, one per day of the past week — gold marks a day with an entry, dim marks a day without, and today glows brightest. A presence tracker at a glance, not a mood readout.

Streak on watch

A wrist-sized view of your current streak with a gentle nudge when you haven't logged today — without ever feeling like a chore.

Watch complications

A quick primer on what Cairn's watch complications are, what each one shows, and how to add them to your watch face.

Cairn Mood complication

Your current mood at a glance, designed for circular and rectangular watch face slots. Updates after every entry.

Cairn Streak complication

Your journaling streak as a watch face number — a quiet daily reminder of the practice you're building.

Cairn Energy complication

Your current energy level on the watch face — a small dial that mirrors what your last entries said about your bandwidth today.

Cairn Detail complication

Mood, energy and streak combined into one larger watch face slot — the whole picture in a single rectangular tile.

Cairn Week complication

Your mood week as seven small dots on the watch face — designed for the rectangular slot on Modular and Infograph faces.

Cairn corner complication

A minimal corner-slot complication for round watch faces, surfacing today's mood without taking up real estate.

On-device AI (Apple Foundation Models)

How Cairn analyzes mood, energy and themes entirely on your iPhone using Apple's Foundation Models — no entries ever leave the device for analysis.

Cloud AI with your own key

Bring your own API key (OpenAI, Mistral) for deeper monthly analysis. The key lives in your Keychain and nothing is stored on Cairn's servers.

Managed AI (Pro)

Cairn Pro routes your deeper analyses through a managed Mistral relay — no key needed, end-to-end encrypted in transit, content never logged.

Privacy model

What stays on your devices, what leaves only when you ask for it, and what — if anything — Cairn ever sees. The short answer: the journal itself never leaves your device, not even to iCloud.