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I see a lot of discussion about SRS, and I think most can agree they have improved. What I would like to see covered is a more vague area, but almost more impo

I see a lot of discussion about SRS, and I think most can agree they have improved. What I would like to see covered is a more vague area, but almost more important: It’s the space in between reading/understanding something and the SRS. There are almost no standalone tools dedicated to creating flashcards easily from existing programs (web browser, PDF readers etc.) into popular SRS (Anki, Mochi etc.). They should work almost as OS additions to make everything feel native and frictionless; I don’t need another standalone tool that does X Y and Z, I just need some sort of pipe into an SRS that is Mac friendly and does the job whilst not being in the way. If someone knows of such a tool, I would love to hear about it.

_1tem 1y ago
Just tried RemNote with their AI-generated cards features and so far looks amazing. They can generate cards from PDFs, webpages and notes.
- aaldrick 1y ago
  Thank you - I'll give it a try!
  - aaldrick 1y ago
    Okay on first try, this seems promising, I'll try the pro sub tomorrow properly and take it for a proper spin, but: - I read a lot of PDFs. I can click a sentence and have it suggest cards, or fill my own. That's already a great start on the "space in between".
    - _1tem 1y ago
      With the pro subscription I was able to prompt Claude 3.5 to instruct it to create the flashcards with specific question types that I wanted. Worked much better than the standard free auto-flashcard creation.
      - aaldrick 1y ago
        Yeah, I just tried it with the pro subscription, it is quite excellent; this might be exactly what I was looking for. Thanks again!
allenu 1y ago
I've written my own flashcards app (Fresh Cards) and once in a while, users ask if there's a way to import flashcards from things like web pages and PDF files, but to be honest, I still don't know how it would work, so maybe you can help me. From a user standpoint, would it be an interactive process where you highlight things and then click a button to say "turn this into a flashcard", or would it be an automated tool that would scan the content and come up with a list of questions and answers t hat would test the material for you? What criteria would be used to determine what's worth turning into a question and answer? And how granular should the question be? I've seen demos of things that pick out specific facts, like dates or names, from the text to turn into questions, but that might not be that useful to quiz for some material. It seems like a very open-ended process to me, so it would be hard to get right for everyone's needs.
- aaldrick 1y ago
  I've tried Fresh Cards so thank you for developing that app, and trying to add cool new software into the space. Great question. Here's one way to do it: The first is how clunky the process of going from X to flashcard feels to the end user. One way to deal with the fact that we are crossing software border is to add an extra step where highlighting something allows you to go into an "inbox" before any cards are made. It is clear what the user has to do. They read something interesting, and add it to the inbox. When they are ready, they can head over and only then use some sort of automation (either via custom prompt for an AI or otherwise) to make the cards. This gives them another step, or interface, at which they can decide whether or not the thing they highlighted (since highlighting is easy) is actually worth something. It segments the process into clear easy sections: highlighting, deciding which highlights to flashcardify (and therefore keep), and flashcard review. It definitely is an open-ended process, and I appreciate that apps need to have a strong opinion on how to direct users from start to finish; but I feel this is definitely possible now with cheap and quick AI. I didn't answer every question but hopefully that helps somewhat.
  - allenu 1y ago
    I appreciate the detailed answer. That's a really good point about the software boundary and how that adds friction to just creating cards in the first place. I like the idea of an inbox where you just toss things you think are worth remembering and maybe having a browser plugin or OS shortcut to save highlighted bits of info, but not necessarily creating a flashcard immediately from it. There's definitely some concrete things I can prototype here to try to make that workflow easier. And I can see how taking those tidbits of info and passing them to AI to create flashcards is doable too.
cosmic_cheese 1y ago
The macOS services model seems like a good fit for this kind of thing. Services are little bits of context-aware functionality that apps expose to enable integration between apps without active developer involvement. An example, in most Mac apps if you select text, right-click to open the context menu, and open the Services submenu you’ll see a number of services that do something with the highlighted text. Ideally the SRS app would make services available to facilitate quick creation of new cards, so for example one might highlight some text, right-click, and select Services → New SRS Card… which then opens an in-place lightweight card creator dialog.
- aaldrick 1y ago
  I hadn't thought of this; thank you for bringing this up. I will actually read into this. I didn't write it in my original comment, but I almost mentioned the OS because I'm coming round to the idea (albeit slowly) that the OS needs to provide some sort of hook into this capability natively for both maximum adoption and also ease of use (for both developer and end user). Perhaps Shortcuts are now powerful enough to do this as a PoC, providing the SRS has some sort of open API that Shortcuts can take advantage of.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    > the OS needs to provide some sort of hook into this capability natively for both maximum adoption and also ease of use (for both developer and end user) I’m absolutely of this mind, but unfortunately it also depends on developers’ willingness to make use of these hooks, and it’s becoming increasingly uncommon for third party apps to have any integration or automation affordances, especially any specific to any particular platform. It’s become the norm to ship the absolute bare minimum, which is the lowest common denominator “it runs”.
    - aaldrick 1y ago
      A great shame, I see your point. I guess it comes down to the developer treating their product as something that could "help people" or something that "pays the bills". Hopefully the former would lead them to caring enough to spend the extra time for these significant QoL improvements.
fplonka 1y ago
This mostly works with Mochi - you can paste PDFs etc into ChatGPT and the Mochi markdown format is simple, so it can generate flashcards for you (I have the format explained in my system prompt so I don't have to re-explain it every time). This synergizes nicely with the fact that you really want to understand something before you make flashcards from it. If you pay for Mochi you also get API access, so one could make a ChatGPT wrapper which adds the cards for you. But since I like to review the cards manually before adding I don't mind the copy paste step.
- aaldrick 1y ago
  Yes, I do something like this now. It definitely does do the job. I just wonder if there could be something more, something smoother perhaps, and the API access could do the trick.
gwd 1y ago
> It’s the space in between reading/understanding something and the SRS. ...If someone knows of such a tool, I would love to hear about it. I have a slightly different system I'm developing: Rather than reviewing with flashcards, review with actual content: 1. Tag the content with the words and grammar concepts 2. Estimate the difficulty [1] for you of each word or grammar concept -- the difficulty being essentially the inverse of your familiarity graphs in this article. 3. Choose content to read which balances difficulty and the impact on learning. Since reviewing something you're about to forget has more impact than learning something new, "spaced repetition" falls naturally. And instead of spending your review time going through flash cards, you spend your review time reading content in the target language. [1] If you know the details of the FSRS algorithm, I'm using "difficulty" here differently than they do in their algorithm.
- aaldrick 1y ago
  Not sure I understood the gist, but let me try summarise what you do generally (i.e. not just for language learning). - Instead of flashcards, you read content/write notes. - You tag said content in some way which allows you to understand how difficult it is. - When in "review" mode, you essentially choose what to reread based on the difficulty you are feeling has the most impact right now.
  - gwd 1y ago
    One of the frustrating things I experienced trying to do self-study using Anki and self-created "extensive reading" was that I found I was spending a huge amount of my time doing things to enable me to study, rather than actually studying. So my ideal vision for what the interaction looks like is this: 1. You ask for something to read / watch. 2. It gives you something 3. You read / watch it, looking up words you don't know, going on whatever rabbit trails you need to to understand what it's given you. 4. Repeat. IOW, I want the algorithm to do the "look for stuff to study" and "decide what to review", so I can just focus on the "study" part. It would have a huge library of content ("corpus" in the jargon) -- news articles, Wikipedia, stories, social media posts, movies, TV episodes, whatever. The algorithm would select something for you that's at the right difficulty level -- hard enough that you're learning, but not so hard that you get frustrated. The algorithm would arrange for words that you need review on to just appear in the content you happened to be reading. Maybe you give it parameters (something long / short / fiction / news), maybe not. Maybe you give it feedback about which words were harder or easier than it expected, maybe not. Certainly a useful feature would be to say, "I want to be able to read this", and give it a link to a webpage or YT video, or a PDF; it could then focus your learning / review towards being able to read that particular content. But the common case would be that you just come to it and be given a feed, as you would with Facebook and Youtube -- except the algorithm would be trying to teach you a language, rather than trying to get you to watch ads.
Macha 1y ago
Some examples I'm aware of (mostly in the language learning and especially Japanese learning space) - subs2srs MPV script: create srs cards from subtitled videos, if you have subtitles tracks for source and target language it will fill them both in (though that sometimes has caveats, different languages may distribute the meaning of a line of dialogue over different subtitle lines) - asbplayer chrome extension: inject extra subtitle languages into streaming services and create flashcards from them similar to subs2srs - yomitan: browser dictionary lookup, primarily for bilingual dictionaries for Japanese and Chinese but also has custom dictionary support.
- hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
  You can add my https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/audio2anki https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/audio2anki script to the space, in a similar position to subs2srs. The big thing my script does differently is run Whisper locally to actually generate the subtitles from the video themselves. Most videos out in the real world don't come with convenient little SRT files bundled with them. It doesn't yet shell out anywhere to automatically provide a translation, but that's more because I was already past that stage for most of its output reading-wise. It's explicitly tuned to make listening practice SRSable. (I originally built this for learning Finnish. For the other 2 people here on that journey, https://finbug.xyz/ https://finbug.xyz/ is where I've collected the other software I've built over the years for this.)
HSO 1y ago
On Mac, you could make a little Shortcut that accepts your text selection or maybe even a screenshot and sends it to AnkiConnect to make a new note. Add this Shortcut to your share sheet and you can create new notes from any app. Later, go over the notes in Anki and add questions or if really lazy send the backsides to an LLM to create those questions.
- aaldrick 1y ago
  Thank you - I hadn't considered this.
  - HSO 1y ago
    Now I wanted it for myself and just made it. So at least I can confirm this works. Only difference is I don´t actually use the sharesheet much so I do it with clipboard content: Step 1. Take screenshot or copy text. Step 2. Make a request to AnkiConnect and have it create a new card with clipboard in Anki. Works flawlessly on Mac/Desktop but if you want to do it from mobile devices, you have to muck around with network permissions. Too much for this evening but this alone opens up possibilities. Thanks for the stimulating question! :)
kqr 1y ago
> There are almost no standalone tools dedicated to creating flashcards easily from existing programs I think this is a common misunderstanding. Half the benefit of SRS comes from working out what the flashcards are. You have to circle around a concept, look for similarities, differences, examples, generalisations, properties, etc. Is it hard work? Yes. Does it help understanding? Massively. This is also a very difficult skill which, I believe, is why many people fail to appreciate SRS. They try, write bad flashcards, don't see results, and give up. EDIT: This also leads to another common misunderstanding, that SRS is only good for memorising facts. With proper elaboration (thanks child comment), it can be used to build understanding of complex subjects too.
- indolering 1y ago
  The technical term is "elaboration" and it is key to long term retention.
- aaldrick 1y ago
  Fair point, please see my comment in response to allenu, in this same thread, for a detailed view. I did not mean to glaze over this aspect, I am aware this is very important. I can not and do not use AI for automating flashcards for this reason alone. But, I think my point still stands, getting information from one disparate app into another adds a lot of friction (saving it somewhere, copy and pasting and yada yada) to something that (I believe) should be as easy as possible. We have 1 click instant payment, but I can't have 1 click get this into some sort of inbox in Anki ready to flashcard-ify? To be honest, I have a whole frustration with apps and windows that I'm still trying to word, but fundamentally all we are doing when we are "computing" is moving information around. I wish that information was a first class citizen at the OS level that could be leveraged by any app immediately. Utopian view but this stuff ain't gonna think about itself.
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  That's usually done by writing and elaborating notes. I think it's not clear to most people how flash cards improve this. The original idea of flash cards is rote memorization of facts that need fast (automatic) retrieval.
- 1y ago
vjerancrnjak 1y ago
I’d say a missing thing is figuring out the order in which cards have to be shown. Showing schlafen before ausschlafen, or contextually simpler cards before more complex ones. Optimizing blindly easy medium hard and next time to show a card is probably very far away from efficient learning. If the process is inspected, most of the forever knowledge that I acquired I heard once and internalized.
edanm 1y ago
I've never used it, but my understanding is that something that does this is considered a "killer feature" of Supermemo. It has a mode that lets you read text (via a PDF viewer) and lets you create flashcards as you read in some kind of semi-automated way. Or something like that. Like I said, I never used it.
- Tomte 1y ago
  No, not PDF, only HTML. There are community companion programs like SuperMemo Assistant, that enhance SM, but it‘s all fiddly. I paid for two SM versions and went back to Anki. It‘s very idiodyncratic, the user interface is atrocious (in the latest version it finally, finally added thumbs up/down icons for grading the answer —- before that you had to remember whether 1 is good and 5 is bad or vice versa). SM is fascinating (including task management, sleep cycle tracker etc.), but it‘s held back by its technological choices (only support for Edge or IE, and Edge only in the newest version), and for incremental reading you‘ll be mostly ingesting Wikipedia articles, because PDF isn‘t supported.
  - aaldrick 1y ago
    +1 SM is really interesting. Supermemo.guru (URL) is a fascinating resource written by a fascinating person (the creator of Supermemo), but the software is so unusable that it immediately shoots itself in the foot (or head). I don't think anyone should ever use it, but people should take away from it interesting concepts that they can use when writing new software.
  - sandspar 1y ago
    Supermemo is neat but it seems too dependent on the whims of one guy. Same reason I'm hesitant to use LingQ to learn languages.
- LittleFishyChan 1y ago
  You’re referring to incremental reading, which yes is indeed one of the killer features of SuperMemo. You're basically just reading, but you have at the core of it an SRS (SuperMemo) to store cool ideas in flashcard form and every article (“Topics” is how they are referred to in SuperMemo) will be shown to you at a later date. I like to think of them all on a “conveyor belt” that means everything you put into it will eventually find its way back to you. I love incremental reading but for many years I have struggled to find a way to mimic this OUTSIDE of SuperMemo. The overall peace of mind and level of control I have over the learning process is quite remarkable, and incremental reading is more than just the sum of its parts. I wish there were a standalone app for your phone or iPad for incremental reading, as I would love to use my iPad to do what I do when reading in SuperMemo on my windows laptop.
MarceColl 1y ago
It's tricky I think, I think it comes down to specialized tools for different systems. I'm building a tool for Japanese in this direction. But of course it doesn't generalize to everything since the content and context extraction is very objective dependent.
- aaldrick 1y ago
  I agree, it is tricky. But I believe it is possible, see my response in this thread to the user allenu as a middle ground.
  - MarceColl 1y ago
    AI definitely helps here (and it's the direction I'm going), although to start exploring the space in a way that makes sense to me (and because it's a problem I have), I've reduced the space into these steps: * I wanna be able to watch X in Y language * I know these words * Help me
christiangenco 1y ago
I solve this problem with a system prompt in my LLMs[1]. ChatGPT is the main spot where I'm going to be trying to understand a new concept, so after groking it I'll ask it to make flashcards which I can then just copy and paste into Mochi. An improvement would be some sort of MCP integration between the LLM and Mochi so it can just add the card directly. I'm sure we'll get there soon. 1. https://gist.github.com/christiangenco/db4b61c315b93fc2a404a85e831cfa1a https://gist.github.com/christiangenco/db4b61c315b93fc2a404a...
maxdarapper 1y ago
I built a native flashcard app for mac that includes spaced repetition. You can close the main window, so it is not in the way and just select add flashcard from the top right menu bar in whichever application you are in https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flashcard-max/id1430950704 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flashcard-max/id1430950704
mfranzs 1y ago
This is what we've built RemNote for! You can add your sources (PDFs, websites, YouTube, etc.) and create cards directly from them. Either with AI (click on a sentence => get an AI card), or by highlighting a sentence and writing your own card. It's not at the OS level, but I think a focused standalone all-in-one experience is actually better. We've explored a chrome extension here that does something similar to what you suggest, but it somehow hasn't proven useful in practice. I always keep coming back to just doing everything directly in the tool (upload PDF, take notes, make cards), as it helps me focus deeply on what I'm learning.
- coldcache 1y ago
  Love RemNote -- ability to take notes and create SRS cards within the notes is so sick
- jonahhorowitz 1y ago
  Does RemNote use the algorithm described in the link or something else?
  - mfranzs 1y ago
    Yep, you can either use FSRS (the one described in the link), or Anki-SM2.
- aaldrick 1y ago
  I tried Remnote yesterday for the first time, after another user in this same thread recommended it. I put a paper in, and clicked a sentence and ... it is somewhat magical. This is exactly what I meant, somewhere to have PDFs etc. and an easy way to make cards immediately. I bought pro with AI, and then I put a full paper in. I asked the AI to make flashcards of the whole paper; it worked so well, it's basically SuperMemo's original idea of incremental reading. Looking forward to using it more, thanks for your hard work.
sandspar 1y ago
I've fiddled with a bunch of stuff - macros, standalone programs etc - before finally settling on copy and paste. I just copy and paste a page of PDF into Anki then cloze single words (~6-15 words a page). I've worked through several textbooks this way.
YawningAngel 1y ago
Yomitan (https://yomitan.wiki/ https://yomitan.wiki/) does this
AlchemistCamp 1y ago
If you're speaking in the context of language learning, there definitely are some great tools for "mining" audio cards from YT/Netflix and also for getting text from the subtitle tracks. Some are open source, free and easy once you get used to working with them (much like Anki itself). They're not frictionless for first-time users, though. Others are paid and a bit more newbie-friendly.
deleted 1y ago
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iLemming 1y ago
> If someone knows of such a tool, I would love to hear about it. Well, you probably not gonna like this but Emacs with Org-mode is excellent for managing Anki cards. My SR cards are not in some other medium — they are literally my notes. I can edit them freely; I can generate new content easily (e.g., using LLMs); I can turn any thought or a book quote into a card and vice-versa; cards are version controlled; I can embed formulas and code snippets; they are easy to search through; they are platform-independent; they are contextual — my cards are intertwined with additional notes, book annotations, screenshots, video links, etc — they help me study subjects with immersion;
melagonster 1y ago
Ah, I did not notice that. But I think you are finding the incremental reading function of Supermemo.

_1tem 1y ago

Just tried RemNote with their AI-generated cards features and so far looks amazing. They can generate cards from PDFs, webpages and notes.

aaldrick 1y ago
Thank you - I'll give it a try!
- aaldrick 1y ago
  Okay on first try, this seems promising, I'll try the pro sub tomorrow properly and take it for a proper spin, but: - I read a lot of PDFs. I can click a sentence and have it suggest cards, or fill my own. That's already a great start on the "space in between".
  - _1tem 1y ago
    With the pro subscription I was able to prompt Claude 3.5 to instruct it to create the flashcards with specific question types that I wanted. Worked much better than the standard free auto-flashcard creation.
    - aaldrick 1y ago
      Yeah, I just tried it with the pro subscription, it is quite excellent; this might be exactly what I was looking for. Thanks again!

allenu 1y ago

I've written my own flashcards app (Fresh Cards) and once in a while, users ask if there's a way to import flashcards from things like web pages and PDF files, but to be honest, I still don't know how it would work, so maybe you can help me. From a user standpoint, would it be an interactive process where you highlight things and then click a button to say "turn this into a flashcard", or would it be an automated tool that would scan the content and come up with a list of questions and answers t hat would test the material for you? What criteria would be used to determine what's worth turning into a question and answer? And how granular should the question be? I've seen demos of things that pick out specific facts, like dates or names, from the text to turn into questions, but that might not be that useful to quiz for some material. It seems like a very open-ended process to me, so it would be hard to get right for everyone's needs.

aaldrick 1y ago
I've tried Fresh Cards so thank you for developing that app, and trying to add cool new software into the space. Great question. Here's one way to do it: The first is how clunky the process of going from X to flashcard feels to the end user. One way to deal with the fact that we are crossing software border is to add an extra step where highlighting something allows you to go into an "inbox" before any cards are made. It is clear what the user has to do. They read something interesting, and add it to the inbox. When they are ready, they can head over and only then use some sort of automation (either via custom prompt for an AI or otherwise) to make the cards. This gives them another step, or interface, at which they can decide whether or not the thing they highlighted (since highlighting is easy) is actually worth something. It segments the process into clear easy sections: highlighting, deciding which highlights to flashcardify (and therefore keep), and flashcard review. It definitely is an open-ended process, and I appreciate that apps need to have a strong opinion on how to direct users from start to finish; but I feel this is definitely possible now with cheap and quick AI. I didn't answer every question but hopefully that helps somewhat.
- allenu 1y ago
  I appreciate the detailed answer. That's a really good point about the software boundary and how that adds friction to just creating cards in the first place. I like the idea of an inbox where you just toss things you think are worth remembering and maybe having a browser plugin or OS shortcut to save highlighted bits of info, but not necessarily creating a flashcard immediately from it. There's definitely some concrete things I can prototype here to try to make that workflow easier. And I can see how taking those tidbits of info and passing them to AI to create flashcards is doable too.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago

The macOS services model seems like a good fit for this kind of thing. Services are little bits of context-aware functionality that apps expose to enable integration between apps without active developer involvement. An example, in most Mac apps if you select text, right-click to open the context menu, and open the Services submenu you’ll see a number of services that do something with the highlighted text. Ideally the SRS app would make services available to facilitate quick creation of new cards, so for example one might highlight some text, right-click, and select Services → New SRS Card… which then opens an in-place lightweight card creator dialog.

aaldrick 1y ago
I hadn't thought of this; thank you for bringing this up. I will actually read into this. I didn't write it in my original comment, but I almost mentioned the OS because I'm coming round to the idea (albeit slowly) that the OS needs to provide some sort of hook into this capability natively for both maximum adoption and also ease of use (for both developer and end user). Perhaps Shortcuts are now powerful enough to do this as a PoC, providing the SRS has some sort of open API that Shortcuts can take advantage of.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  > the OS needs to provide some sort of hook into this capability natively for both maximum adoption and also ease of use (for both developer and end user) I’m absolutely of this mind, but unfortunately it also depends on developers’ willingness to make use of these hooks, and it’s becoming increasingly uncommon for third party apps to have any integration or automation affordances, especially any specific to any particular platform. It’s become the norm to ship the absolute bare minimum, which is the lowest common denominator “it runs”.
  - aaldrick 1y ago
    A great shame, I see your point. I guess it comes down to the developer treating their product as something that could "help people" or something that "pays the bills". Hopefully the former would lead them to caring enough to spend the extra time for these significant QoL improvements.

fplonka 1y ago

This mostly works with Mochi - you can paste PDFs etc into ChatGPT and the Mochi markdown format is simple, so it can generate flashcards for you (I have the format explained in my system prompt so I don't have to re-explain it every time). This synergizes nicely with the fact that you really want to understand something before you make flashcards from it. If you pay for Mochi you also get API access, so one could make a ChatGPT wrapper which adds the cards for you. But since I like to review the cards manually before adding I don't mind the copy paste step.

aaldrick 1y ago
Yes, I do something like this now. It definitely does do the job. I just wonder if there could be something more, something smoother perhaps, and the API access could do the trick.

gwd 1y ago

> It’s the space in between reading/understanding something and the SRS. ...If someone knows of such a tool, I would love to hear about it. I have a slightly different system I'm developing: Rather than reviewing with flashcards, review with actual content: 1. Tag the content with the words and grammar concepts 2. Estimate the difficulty [1] for you of each word or grammar concept -- the difficulty being essentially the inverse of your familiarity graphs in this article. 3. Choose content to read which balances difficulty and the impact on learning. Since reviewing something you're about to forget has more impact than learning something new, "spaced repetition" falls naturally. And instead of spending your review time going through flash cards, you spend your review time reading content in the target language. [1] If you know the details of the FSRS algorithm, I'm using "difficulty" here differently than they do in their algorithm.

aaldrick 1y ago
Not sure I understood the gist, but let me try summarise what you do generally (i.e. not just for language learning). - Instead of flashcards, you read content/write notes. - You tag said content in some way which allows you to understand how difficult it is. - When in "review" mode, you essentially choose what to reread based on the difficulty you are feeling has the most impact right now.
- gwd 1y ago
  One of the frustrating things I experienced trying to do self-study using Anki and self-created "extensive reading" was that I found I was spending a huge amount of my time doing things to enable me to study, rather than actually studying. So my ideal vision for what the interaction looks like is this: 1. You ask for something to read / watch. 2. It gives you something 3. You read / watch it, looking up words you don't know, going on whatever rabbit trails you need to to understand what it's given you. 4. Repeat. IOW, I want the algorithm to do the "look for stuff to study" and "decide what to review", so I can just focus on the "study" part. It would have a huge library of content ("corpus" in the jargon) -- news articles, Wikipedia, stories, social media posts, movies, TV episodes, whatever. The algorithm would select something for you that's at the right difficulty level -- hard enough that you're learning, but not so hard that you get frustrated. The algorithm would arrange for words that you need review on to just appear in the content you happened to be reading. Maybe you give it parameters (something long / short / fiction / news), maybe not. Maybe you give it feedback about which words were harder or easier than it expected, maybe not. Certainly a useful feature would be to say, "I want to be able to read this", and give it a link to a webpage or YT video, or a PDF; it could then focus your learning / review towards being able to read that particular content. But the common case would be that you just come to it and be given a feed, as you would with Facebook and Youtube -- except the algorithm would be trying to teach you a language, rather than trying to get you to watch ads.

Macha 1y ago

Some examples I'm aware of (mostly in the language learning and especially Japanese learning space) - subs2srs MPV script: create srs cards from subtitled videos, if you have subtitles tracks for source and target language it will fill them both in (though that sometimes has caveats, different languages may distribute the meaning of a line of dialogue over different subtitle lines) - asbplayer chrome extension: inject extra subtitle languages into streaming services and create flashcards from them similar to subs2srs - yomitan: browser dictionary lookup, primarily for bilingual dictionaries for Japanese and Chinese but also has custom dictionary support.

hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
You can add my https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/audio2anki https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/audio2anki script to the space, in a similar position to subs2srs. The big thing my script does differently is run Whisper locally to actually generate the subtitles from the video themselves. Most videos out in the real world don't come with convenient little SRT files bundled with them. It doesn't yet shell out anywhere to automatically provide a translation, but that's more because I was already past that stage for most of its output reading-wise. It's explicitly tuned to make listening practice SRSable. (I originally built this for learning Finnish. For the other 2 people here on that journey, https://finbug.xyz/ https://finbug.xyz/ is where I've collected the other software I've built over the years for this.)

HSO 1y ago

On Mac, you could make a little Shortcut that accepts your text selection or maybe even a screenshot and sends it to AnkiConnect to make a new note. Add this Shortcut to your share sheet and you can create new notes from any app. Later, go over the notes in Anki and add questions or if really lazy send the backsides to an LLM to create those questions.

aaldrick 1y ago
Thank you - I hadn't considered this.
- HSO 1y ago
  Now I wanted it for myself and just made it. So at least I can confirm this works. Only difference is I don´t actually use the sharesheet much so I do it with clipboard content: Step 1. Take screenshot or copy text. Step 2. Make a request to AnkiConnect and have it create a new card with clipboard in Anki. Works flawlessly on Mac/Desktop but if you want to do it from mobile devices, you have to muck around with network permissions. Too much for this evening but this alone opens up possibilities. Thanks for the stimulating question! :)

kqr 1y ago

> There are almost no standalone tools dedicated to creating flashcards easily from existing programs I think this is a common misunderstanding. Half the benefit of SRS comes from working out what the flashcards are. You have to circle around a concept, look for similarities, differences, examples, generalisations, properties, etc. Is it hard work? Yes. Does it help understanding? Massively. This is also a very difficult skill which, I believe, is why many people fail to appreciate SRS. They try, write bad flashcards, don't see results, and give up. EDIT: This also leads to another common misunderstanding, that SRS is only good for memorising facts. With proper elaboration (thanks child comment), it can be used to build understanding of complex subjects too.

indolering 1y ago
The technical term is "elaboration" and it is key to long term retention.
aaldrick 1y ago
Fair point, please see my comment in response to allenu, in this same thread, for a detailed view. I did not mean to glaze over this aspect, I am aware this is very important. I can not and do not use AI for automating flashcards for this reason alone. But, I think my point still stands, getting information from one disparate app into another adds a lot of friction (saving it somewhere, copy and pasting and yada yada) to something that (I believe) should be as easy as possible. We have 1 click instant payment, but I can't have 1 click get this into some sort of inbox in Anki ready to flashcard-ify? To be honest, I have a whole frustration with apps and windows that I'm still trying to word, but fundamentally all we are doing when we are "computing" is moving information around. I wish that information was a first class citizen at the OS level that could be leveraged by any app immediately. Utopian view but this stuff ain't gonna think about itself.
ants_everywhere 1y ago
That's usually done by writing and elaborating notes. I think it's not clear to most people how flash cards improve this. The original idea of flash cards is rote memorization of facts that need fast (automatic) retrieval.
1y ago

vjerancrnjak 1y ago

I’d say a missing thing is figuring out the order in which cards have to be shown. Showing schlafen before ausschlafen, or contextually simpler cards before more complex ones. Optimizing blindly easy medium hard and next time to show a card is probably very far away from efficient learning. If the process is inspected, most of the forever knowledge that I acquired I heard once and internalized.

edanm 1y ago

I've never used it, but my understanding is that something that does this is considered a "killer feature" of Supermemo. It has a mode that lets you read text (via a PDF viewer) and lets you create flashcards as you read in some kind of semi-automated way. Or something like that. Like I said, I never used it.

Tomte 1y ago
No, not PDF, only HTML. There are community companion programs like SuperMemo Assistant, that enhance SM, but it‘s all fiddly. I paid for two SM versions and went back to Anki. It‘s very idiodyncratic, the user interface is atrocious (in the latest version it finally, finally added thumbs up/down icons for grading the answer —- before that you had to remember whether 1 is good and 5 is bad or vice versa). SM is fascinating (including task management, sleep cycle tracker etc.), but it‘s held back by its technological choices (only support for Edge or IE, and Edge only in the newest version), and for incremental reading you‘ll be mostly ingesting Wikipedia articles, because PDF isn‘t supported.
- aaldrick 1y ago
  +1 SM is really interesting. Supermemo.guru (URL) is a fascinating resource written by a fascinating person (the creator of Supermemo), but the software is so unusable that it immediately shoots itself in the foot (or head). I don't think anyone should ever use it, but people should take away from it interesting concepts that they can use when writing new software.
- sandspar 1y ago
  Supermemo is neat but it seems too dependent on the whims of one guy. Same reason I'm hesitant to use LingQ to learn languages.
LittleFishyChan 1y ago
You’re referring to incremental reading, which yes is indeed one of the killer features of SuperMemo. You're basically just reading, but you have at the core of it an SRS (SuperMemo) to store cool ideas in flashcard form and every article (“Topics” is how they are referred to in SuperMemo) will be shown to you at a later date. I like to think of them all on a “conveyor belt” that means everything you put into it will eventually find its way back to you. I love incremental reading but for many years I have struggled to find a way to mimic this OUTSIDE of SuperMemo. The overall peace of mind and level of control I have over the learning process is quite remarkable, and incremental reading is more than just the sum of its parts. I wish there were a standalone app for your phone or iPad for incremental reading, as I would love to use my iPad to do what I do when reading in SuperMemo on my windows laptop.

MarceColl 1y ago

It's tricky I think, I think it comes down to specialized tools for different systems. I'm building a tool for Japanese in this direction. But of course it doesn't generalize to everything since the content and context extraction is very objective dependent.

aaldrick 1y ago
I agree, it is tricky. But I believe it is possible, see my response in this thread to the user allenu as a middle ground.
- MarceColl 1y ago
  AI definitely helps here (and it's the direction I'm going), although to start exploring the space in a way that makes sense to me (and because it's a problem I have), I've reduced the space into these steps: * I wanna be able to watch X in Y language * I know these words * Help me

christiangenco 1y ago

I solve this problem with a system prompt in my LLMs[1]. ChatGPT is the main spot where I'm going to be trying to understand a new concept, so after groking it I'll ask it to make flashcards which I can then just copy and paste into Mochi. An improvement would be some sort of MCP integration between the LLM and Mochi so it can just add the card directly. I'm sure we'll get there soon. 1. https://gist.github.com/christiangenco/db4b61c315b93fc2a404a85e831cfa1a https://gist.github.com/christiangenco/db4b61c315b93fc2a404a...

maxdarapper 1y ago

I built a native flashcard app for mac that includes spaced repetition. You can close the main window, so it is not in the way and just select add flashcard from the top right menu bar in whichever application you are in https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flashcard-max/id1430950704 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flashcard-max/id1430950704

mfranzs 1y ago

This is what we've built RemNote for! You can add your sources (PDFs, websites, YouTube, etc.) and create cards directly from them. Either with AI (click on a sentence => get an AI card), or by highlighting a sentence and writing your own card. It's not at the OS level, but I think a focused standalone all-in-one experience is actually better. We've explored a chrome extension here that does something similar to what you suggest, but it somehow hasn't proven useful in practice. I always keep coming back to just doing everything directly in the tool (upload PDF, take notes, make cards), as it helps me focus deeply on what I'm learning.

coldcache 1y ago
Love RemNote -- ability to take notes and create SRS cards within the notes is so sick
jonahhorowitz 1y ago
Does RemNote use the algorithm described in the link or something else?
- mfranzs 1y ago
  Yep, you can either use FSRS (the one described in the link), or Anki-SM2.
aaldrick 1y ago
I tried Remnote yesterday for the first time, after another user in this same thread recommended it. I put a paper in, and clicked a sentence and ... it is somewhat magical. This is exactly what I meant, somewhere to have PDFs etc. and an easy way to make cards immediately. I bought pro with AI, and then I put a full paper in. I asked the AI to make flashcards of the whole paper; it worked so well, it's basically SuperMemo's original idea of incremental reading. Looking forward to using it more, thanks for your hard work.

sandspar 1y ago

I've fiddled with a bunch of stuff - macros, standalone programs etc - before finally settling on copy and paste. I just copy and paste a page of PDF into Anki then cloze single words (~6-15 words a page). I've worked through several textbooks this way.

YawningAngel 1y ago

Yomitan (https://yomitan.wiki/ https://yomitan.wiki/) does this

AlchemistCamp 1y ago

If you're speaking in the context of language learning, there definitely are some great tools for "mining" audio cards from YT/Netflix and also for getting text from the subtitle tracks. Some are open source, free and easy once you get used to working with them (much like Anki itself). They're not frictionless for first-time users, though. Others are paid and a bit more newbie-friendly.

deleted 1y ago

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iLemming 1y ago

> If someone knows of such a tool, I would love to hear about it. Well, you probably not gonna like this but Emacs with Org-mode is excellent for managing Anki cards. My SR cards are not in some other medium — they are literally my notes. I can edit them freely; I can generate new content easily (e.g., using LLMs); I can turn any thought or a book quote into a card and vice-versa; cards are version controlled; I can embed formulas and code snippets; they are easy to search through; they are platform-independent; they are contextual — my cards are intertwined with additional notes, book annotations, screenshots, video links, etc — they help me study subjects with immersion;

melagonster 1y ago

Ah, I did not notice that. But I think you are finding the incremental reading function of Supermemo.