Free flashcards made from your own notes

How do you make flashcards from a lecture or textbook chapter?

You upload the material to Study-Genie and ask for flashcards. The app reads that specific document and pulls cards out of it: definitions, formulas, dates, distinctions that are easy to confuse. Accepted formats include PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, a photo of handwritten notes, an audio recording of a lecture, and pasted text. The cards therefore cover your syllabus rather than someone else's.

A photo goes through character recognition first; a recording is transcribed before being split into cards. Nothing is locked afterwards: every card can be edited, deleted, or split in two, and you can add your own cards to the same deck by hand.

What makes a good flashcard?

A good flashcard tests exactly one idea. The front carries a precise question; the back carries a short answer you can say out loud in a few seconds. As soon as a card holds two concepts, you no longer know which one you failed on, and the review schedule cannot be tuned properly. A long card gets reread instead of recalled, which defeats the point entirely.

The practical rule: if you are wondering whether to split a card in two, split it.

• Weak card — "Photosynthesis" — a topic, not a question.
• Strong card — "What are the inputs and outputs of photosynthesis?"
• Weak card — three causes of the First World War stacked on one back.
• Strong card — one cause per card, with a trigger word on the front.

How does spaced repetition work in Study-Genie?

Spaced repetition means reviewing something just before you would forget it, rather than at fixed intervals. After each card you say whether the recall was easy or hard, and Study-Genie reschedules that card accordingly. What you miss returns quickly; what you know drifts further out. This is the mechanism behind the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve: each successful recall flattens the slope a little.

In practice you never revise a hundred-card deck end to end. A session only shows the cards due that day, which keeps daily revision short enough to survive until the exam.

How do you turn quiz mistakes into flashcards?

Every wrong answer is a concept you have already located, which makes it the best possible raw material for a card. Study-Genie generates quizzes at an adjustable difficulty from the same document, marks your answers, and explains why an option was wrong. You then take the idea that tripped you up and write a card around the exact question that caught you out.

This loop avoids the main flaw of ready-made decks: spending most of your time on things you already know. A deck built from your own mistakes is shorter, more uncomfortable to review, and far more productive.

Can you make flashcards for free, without using AI credits?

Yes. The free Study-Genie plan asks for no payment details and includes 10 flashcards, 5 study sheets or quizzes per month, 150 messages with the AI tutor, and limited document imports. Cards you type yourself fall under manual mode and use no AI quota, so you can keep growing a deck without touching your generations.

If automatic generation becomes your main use, Premium is €14.99 per 28-day cycle with a broad weekly budget you split freely between sheets, quizzes, flashcards, scans, and chat. Ultimate is €19.99 for roughly 2.4 times that budget. Annual billing takes 15% off, and you can cancel at any time.

Can you export your flashcards to Anki?

Yes, decks built in Study-Genie can be exported to Anki. That matters for portability: if you change tools, the work of splitting a chapter into cards does not stay trapped. Anki is built around cards the user writes personally and a highly configurable scheduler; Study-Genie covers the step before that, the one most students abandon, by producing a first set of cards from the document.

The two approaches combine well: generate and clean the cards here, then revise wherever you prefer. You are not required to pick a side.

Can you revise flashcards on your phone?

Yes. Study-Genie runs as a web app and as a mobile app on iOS and Android, with the same account and the same decks. That is what makes spaced repetition realistic: the cards due today can be cleared on the bus or between lessons, in a few minutes, without opening a folder. The interface is available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.

On mobile you can also photograph handwritten notes straight from the camera and turn them into cards the same evening, while the lesson is still fresh.