Help

Connect with a Canvas API token:

1. In UniVerse, open Setup → Canvas. Enter your Canvas URL (e.g. bowdoin.instructure.com).
2. Click "How do I get one?" — there's a 4-step guide right there.
3. It'll deep-link straight to your Canvas Settings so you don't have to hunt around. Generate a new access token (Purpose: "UniVerse"), copy it, paste it into UniVerse.
4. Click Connect. We'll find your courses and let you pick which to import.

Some schools disable Canvas API token generation for students. You can still import by hand:

• Manual import — add classes by name and drop your syllabus PDF. Cosmo auto-builds the lecture schedule from your syllabus.

Cosmo answers based on what's open on your screen. If you're on the dashboard or class home, there's no specific reading active. To get the best answers:

• Open a lecture from the sidebar.
• Open a PDF from the Resources section.
• Or take some notes — Cosmo reads along as you type.

The greeting in the AI panel adapts to what's loaded — if it says "Drop a PDF or take notes first," that's the signal.

When you import from Canvas (or upload manually), Cosmo extracts the text from every PDF, slide deck, and reading. That text becomes part of the context every time you ask a question, alongside the visible page you're on.

For specific questions, the visible page is weighted highest — so opening a PDF and asking "explain this" works better than asking from the dashboard.

It happens — every AI gets things wrong sometimes. A few things you can do:

• Click the citation chip in the answer. It opens the source page so you can verify.
• Ask Cosmo to show its work. "Walk me through how you got that" usually surfaces the reasoning.
• Push back. "I think that's wrong, the textbook says X" — Cosmo will reconsider with new info.

Always verify against your actual course materials. Cosmo is a study aid, not a source of truth.

Cosmo is a study aid, like Khan Academy or Photomath. It teaches concepts and walks you through reasoning — but it auto-detects signals of graded work (point values, "submit by", platform names like Canvas/Gradescope) and refuses to give direct answers in those cases. Instead it'll explain the underlying concepts and generate similar practice problems.

If you're using it the way it's designed — to understand material — you're using it the right way. If you paste in a take-home exam, it'll politely refuse.

Deep cram generates a multi-page study guide that reads through every doc you select and writes a comprehensive review. It's the most expensive thing the AI does — 30-90 seconds per generate, and roughly the cost of 25-50 normal AI calls.

To keep the service free during beta, we cap deep generates at 5 per day per user. The lighter Refresher and Review depths have no daily limit.

UniVerse syncs once per day, in the early morning (1–5am local time) so we don't pile load on Canvas servers during class hours. To force a sync now:

• Click the cloud icon next to a class name in the sidebar — manually re-syncs that class.
• Or in Settings → Canvas, click Re-import.

If a file you know exists isn't appearing, check the import filter — open the post-import summary modal and turn off filtering in Settings → Canvas if we filtered something out by mistake.

Probably not actually lost. Open the dashboard — there's an Unsaved drafts tile that captures any tutor / practice session that ended without explicit save-or-discard. Click Resume to pick up where you left off, or Save to file it as a lecture under one of your classes.

Drafts are kept for 14 days. Notes inside actual lectures auto-save on every keystroke and never need recovery.

Most often: the service worker is rebuilding its cache after an update. Try a hard reload (cmd-shift-R / ctrl-shift-R) and it should snap back.

If it's still slow:

• Settings → Account → Export data, then Delete account, then sign back up. Clears any corrupted local state.
• Email jack@getuniverse.app with what you were doing — sometimes it's a specific class with a huge file we need to debug.

Settings → Account → Delete account. Wipes everything immediately and irreversibly. If you'd rather export first, there's an Export Data button in the same menu — gives you all your notes, classes, and chats as JSON.

No. Your notes, conversations, and uploaded readings are stored privately on your account. We don't train any AI models on student data. The AI providers we use (Anthropic, OpenAI, Groq) don't retain inputs after responses per their published policies.

Full details in our Privacy Policy.

UniVerse doesn't interact with your school's plagiarism detector or Canvas's analytics. We don't post anything back to Canvas. The Canvas API token is read-only — we can pull syllabi and slides but never modify your enrollment, grades, or submissions.

That said: don't paste UniVerse's output verbatim into a graded assignment. Cosmo's job is to help you understand the material so you can write the answer in your own words. We auto-refuse direct answers on detected graded work.