We all want to learn. We all want to know things, to remember what we read, to be the walking encyclopedia that can recall just the right point at just the right moment.
The problem with knowing things, however, is that we have to remember them. Despite our fervent hopes, most of us do not have eidetic memories. What we remember best is not the function of mitochondria in cells but rather our embarrassments, that time we wore crocs with socks to school, for example. In our effort to remember the former type of memory, many of us turn to flashcards.
Flashcards are versatile study tools with many use cases. Many of us most likely only use them as last-minute study techniques, as a way to remember information not long before a test. Others may use them as tools for learning language. An increasing number of people, however, have begun using flashcards as a tool for lifelong learning. Some researchers, like Michael Nielson, employ flashcard programs like Anki for longer-term memorization of key points and facts from research papers.
In this medium, flashcards serve as a supplement or even a replacement for notes. Flashcards, unlike notes, are less ephemeral in our memories. Once created, we can use flashcard programs to continually remind us of information in ways that our often haphazardly stored notes cannot. This repetitive practice testing has been shown by researchers like John Dunlosky and his colleagues to be one of the most effective ways to acquire and review knowledge for both short-term goals like a looming test or long-term ones of life-long learning.
The difficulty with flashcards, however, is that they generally take a lot of work to create. Most of us are lazy, and we tend to look for the easiest way out, even when it hurts us in the long run. It takes discipline to make notes when reading, and even more to create flashcards from those notes. In the end, most of us resort to simply highlighting or even just skimming over the text in hopes that we retain some general gist.
This is where Flashable, the AI-powered flashcard generator, can help. Flashable leverages recent advances in natural language processing, and specifically the work of researcher Patil Suraj on question generation, to automatically create flashcards from the inputted text.
Flashable accepts links to webpages, as well as documents in text file, word doc, or pdf form. Flashable cleans the text extracted from these webpages and documents before further use. For finer-grained control, you can also just copy and paste text into the system. Flashable then uses this text to create flashcard candidates with phrasing different from the original content and exact context.
Unfortunately, AI is not perfect, and everyone has slightly different criteria and wants in their flashcards. Therefore, it is crucial to give users a say in the process as well. In the following edit view, you are able to modify or even delete flashcard candidates. If the AI has missed a particularly important point, you may add a new flashcard as well. Once editing is finished, Flashable allows you to export your created flashcards into a file that is easily importable to most major flashcard programs, including Quizlet and Anki.
To be a life-long learner is not an easy task, and until we reach the stage when our human memories may be directly augmented by technology, it will always remain this way. Making flashcards will always take a degree of work. But with Flashable’s semi-automated approach, we hope to relieve some of the burden of learning.
Built With
- fastapi
- python