Check the continuity of your manuscript by following a character or a motif
The eyes that were green in chapter 3 and brown in chapter 17. The village that was in the north and later in the south. The image that worked once and shows up three more times.
HILO gathers every appearance of a character, an object, or a motif, with the chapter and page of each, so you can read them together instead of going through the whole manuscript.
- Finds the motif even when it's named differently
- Gives you back the edited manuscript as .docx
- Download the thread's summary or its map
Seven tools for the manuscript
Gather a topic
Every appearance of a character, an object, or a motif, with the chapter and page of each, even when they're named differently.
Fix the passages together
The appearances are corrected on a single screen and the whole manuscript downloads as .docx, with the original untouched.
Summarize by topic
What the manuscript says about a character or a plotline, with the chapter of each part. Useful for the synopsis and for the query letter.
Concept map
The character or motif and its branches, drawn from the manuscript. It shows where in the book it is concentrated and where it disappears.
The names of one and the same thing
The variants the manuscript uses to name the same character or place, grouped and counted. It's where you find that the village changed its name in chapter 12.
The world and its terms
The passages where the manuscript defines an invented term, a rule, or a place, gathered to check that the rule in chapter 4 still holds in chapter 19.
Find verbatim quotes in interviews
If the manuscript is nonfiction or a biography based on interviews, the verbatim quotes about a point, with who said them and on which page, ready to paste.
What gets checked before you submit to the publisher
It works for novels, essays, nonfiction books, manuals, and anthologies. The longer the text and the longer it took to write, the easier it is for a detail to drift without anyone noticing.
A character should be the same from start to finish
It gathers every appearance of a character, with its chapter, so you can review in one go the traits, the age, the relationships, and everything that was said about them across the book.
An image shouldn't come back three times
A metaphor that works the first time and wears out by the third. It gathers the appearances of a motif so you can decide which one stays and which ones change.
The voice shouldn't change by accident
In texts written over months, the register drifts. Gathering everything said about the same subject shows whether the tone held.
The facts of the book's world should match
Distances, dates, place names, internal rules. In manuals and nonfiction, also that a single concept is always explained the same way.
Your document isn't stored on our servers
Reading the document and editing happen on your computer. Changes are saved to your own Google Drive or Microsoft 365, in your account. An unpublished manuscript isn't saved anywhere else. When you use an AI feature, only the passage needed for that query is sent to Gemini, Google's model, and HILO doesn't store it.
No. HILO doesn't write, doesn't suggest paragraphs, and doesn't fill in what's missing. All it does is gather what you already wrote on a point and put it together so you can review it. Every passage it shows comes from your document and keeps its page number, so you can always go back to the original and check it. The writing, and the decision about what to change, remain yours.
Yes. It is built for long documents, which is where a character or a motif gets scattered across dozens of chapters. You can work chapter by chapter or with the whole manuscript.
With smart search, yes: it groups by topic even when the exact name doesn't appear, so it also brings up indirect mentions. Without AI it groups by keyword.
Both. You can download the full document with your edits applied, the thread's summary separately, or the map as PNG or SVG.
Not on our servers. Processing happens in your browser and saving goes to your own Google Drive or Microsoft 365.
Word documents (.docx) and PDF. PDFs are read, searched, and coded; the download with your changes is always .docx.
No. HILO doesn't judge the text or suggest rewrites: it gathers what you wrote on each point so that you, or whoever edits your work, can see it together.
Try it without signing up
Look at the example with a novel, or upload your manuscript and follow a character. Without signing up, search is by keyword. To search by meaning, create a free account: it comes with 100 welcome hilos, the unit HILO uses to measure AI usage.