Before you start: Step 5 reads your dashboard selection — Step 1 Curriculum, Step 2 Subject, Step 3 Chapter, Step 4 Topic. Choose all four on the Dashboard first. With nothing selected the chat opens, but ASAI has no topic to build a technique around.

Memory Palace

Method of Loci. The oldest of the six, and the one ASAI opens with the most scene-setting.

What ASAI does first

It asks you to choose a place you know well — a childhood home, your current flat — and then names the first two stations inside it before placing anything. The priming message ends by asking you to walk the two stations in your head and confirm they are vivid.

A real reply on Characteristics of living organisms:

Phase 1: Priming the Palace — To begin, I need you to choose a very familiar location... Picture the front door, the hallway, and the living room.

It then anchors two concepts, each with a Locus, a picture, and an Action:

• Locus 1 — The Front Door. A neon M.R.S. GREN bouncer juggling a heart, a lung and a plant, checking your pulse before you may enter.
• Locus 2 — The Hallway Coat Rack. Thousands of see-through LEGO bricks, each with a blinking nucleus — the cells.

Then it coaches

Every placement is followed by Coaching Questions — "Does the front door bouncer look vivid enough? Maybe give him a funny hat." The point is that an image you adjust yourself is one you keep.

How it knows you are done

You can walk through your palace and correctly name the concept at each locus without prompting.

Mastery is a full unaided walk-through, in order, out loud.

Good to know

• Pick a place with more rooms than you think you need — a palace of six stations does not fit a chapter of twenty concepts.
• Exaggeration is the mechanism, not decoration. If an image feels silly, it is working.
• Odd, funny or slightly gross images outperform tidy ones; ASAI leans on this deliberately.