Spaced repetition works. Building the deck is the part people give up on, usually somewhere around the fourth week of term, with a half-finished set of cards for one module out of five.
Studyflash is a flashcard maker that builds it for you. Upload the lecture PDF, the slide deck, a photo of your handwritten notes, or paste the text straight in, and you get a full set of cards back. Read through them, fix the ones that came out wrong, and start studying.
What you can turn into cards
PDFs
Lecture handouts, a scanned chapter, a past paper. Studyflash reads the text layer where there is one and runs OCR (optical character recognition) where there is not, so a scan of a photocopy works as well as a clean export.
Lecture slides
PowerPoint and Keynote exports, and Google Slides once you download them. Slides tend to produce shorter, more definitional cards than a PDF chapter does, because slides are written to be spoken over rather than read. If a deck is mostly diagrams with three words per slide, expect fewer cards than the slide count suggests.
A photo of handwritten notes
Take a picture of the page. Handwriting recognition is the weakest input here and it does better with printed capitals than with joined-up writing, so check the output before you study from it.
A recorded lecture
Record in the app or upload an audio file, and the transcript becomes the source. Covered properly on the lecture recording page.
Pasted text
Nothing to upload. Paste a paragraph, a definition list or a set of notes from another app.
Six kinds of card
Definition, open-ended, fill in the blank, vocabulary pairs, image cards, and image occlusion, where parts of a diagram are covered up and you have to recall what goes underneath.
That last one matters if you learn from labelled figures. Anatomy, histology, circuit diagrams: the picture is the content, and a text card cannot really test you on it.
Spaced repetition, or cram
Spaced repetition schedules each card by how well you actually remember it, so the ones you keep missing come back sooner. That is the mode that builds retention across a term.
Cram mode ignores the schedule and runs the whole deck. For the night before, when the schedule is no longer the point.
There is also a "type answer" option. Worth turning on once you notice you are recognising cards rather than recalling them, because recognition feels like knowing and is not the same thing.
Editing the deck
Search it, filter by status, edit any card, write your own, and delete the ones that are not pulling their weight. If the first generation missed the point of a lecture, regenerate it: the cards you wrote yourself survive that. Export to PDF if you want the deck on paper.
Coming from Anki
Import your .apkg packages and your tab-separated .txt exports. Basic and cloze cards both come across, with cloze becoming fill-in-the-blank.
Images and audio do not import. If your deck is built around media, plan on rebuilding those cards rather than expecting them to arrive.
On your phone
The deck comes as a swipeable stack. Tap to flip, then swipe right for Good, left for Hard, up for Easy, down for Again. Decks you have already generated work offline on the app.
Questions and answers
It depends entirely on what you give it. Feed it a real lecture PDF or a slide deck and the structure is already there, so it is pulling cards out of your material rather than inventing them. Give it a topic name and nothing else and you get generic cards that will not match your exam. Studyflash works from your uploads for that reason.
PDFs, documents, images of handwritten notes, and pasted text. You can also record a lecture in the app and generate cards from the transcript.
Yes, .apkg packages and tab-separated .txt exports. Basic and cloze cards both work. Images and audio are not imported.
Any of them, at any point. Regenerating a deck keeps the cards you wrote yourself.
There is a free plan with a monthly allowance of AI generations, which is enough to see whether the output is any good on your own material. Studying decks you already have is unlimited, and there is no credit card.
Both assume the cards already exist, either because you made them or because someone else did. Studyflash makes them from your own course material. Anki's scheduling is more configurable and its add-on ecosystem is far larger, so if you have already built a system there, you have a real reason to stay. The case for Studyflash is the first hour: PDF in, working deck out.