Guide / Privacy & control
The cloud toggle and bringing your own key
What happens when you ask to go deeper: payload preview, BYO Claude or Gemini key, labeled answers.
On-device models are good and getting better, but some questions deserve a frontier model. SempreNotes’s answer is a cloud route that is off by default, transparent when on, and never required.
Turning it on
- Open Settings → Cloud.
- Flip the cloud toggle.
- Choose a provider — Anthropic Claude or Google Gemini — and paste your own API key. The key is stored in your device’s Keychain, and requests go directly from your device to the provider. No SempreNotes server sits in between, because there is no SempreNotes server.
Using it
The local brain always answers first. When you want more, tap go deeper on a local answer. Before anything is sent, SempreNotes shows you the exact payload:
- Your question text.
- Up to five short text snippets from your memories, each length-capped.
- A fixed instruction string.
That is the entire allowlist. Raw audio, images, identifiers, location, contacts, and your full memory store are structurally excluded — the payload is built from an allowlist, not by trimming. Approve it and it sends; cancel and nothing leaves.
Labeled answers
Every cloud-derived answer carries a visible label, and the involved memory records that a cloud call happened. You can always distinguish what your device produced from what a provider did.
Failure is honest too
No network? Expired key? SempreNotes falls back to its best local answer, labeled as local-only / degraded, with a reconnect option when the problem is your credential. It never hangs and never fakes cloud-quality output.
Auto-routing (optional, off by default)
If you want hard questions escalated without the extra tap, enable auto-route low-confidence queries in the cloud settings. Even then, the payload rules and labeling are identical. Both toggles off remains the default state: fully local, zero egress.