You spend the lecture typing. The sentence you are writing costs you the one being said, and the aside about the exam goes past while you catch up with the slide before it. Recording it on your phone leaves you a file nobody listens back to.
Studyflash records the class as it happens, on your laptop or in the app, and transcribes it. Out of that transcript come the notes, the cards and the quiz: a summary of the lecture, a flashcard deck and a quiz to test yourself with, all built from what was said in the room rather than from the slides.
What you can record
In the lecture hall
Open Studyflash in the browser before the lecturer starts, hit record, and leave it running. It captures through your device's microphone, so the laptop already open on the desk does the work.
On your phone
The app records too, which is the version that survives a full timetable. Phone on the desk, recording on, and what comes back lands in the same course as everything else you keep there.
The slides beside it
Upload the handout or the slide PDF into that course as well, and the recording sits next to it. The transcript and the slides end up as two sources in one place instead of two apps you switch between.
Why the spoken lecture is worth keeping
Slides are written to be spoken over. They carry the headings and the formulas, and the lecturer supplies what joins them up: the example talked through out loud, the aside about which topic tends to come up in the exam. None of that is in the file you download afterwards. A recording keeps the version of the lecture you attended, and the material is built from that.
What the transcript becomes
Three things, without you asking for them: a summary you can edit line by line, a flashcard deck in the same card types as any other deck, and a quiz whose fill-in-the-blank answers are marked on meaning, so a synonym still counts. The transcript stays in the course as a source, which means Max has read it and can answer questions about the ten minutes you lost.
Editing, exporting and studying on the phone
The summary is a normal rich-text document with autosave and a PDF export. The deck takes edits, additions and deletions, or a regeneration that leaves the cards you wrote yourself alone. On the phone the deck is a swipeable stack you can work through offline, and your progress syncs when you reconnect.
Where this pays off most
Lecture courses where the handout is a list of headings. In law or philosophy the argument only exists out loud, and the slides you download afterwards are a table of contents for something you no longer have.
Seminars where nothing is handed out and the discussion is the material. The answer to someone else's question ends up in the transcript, and what went on the board goes in as a photo of your notes.
A semester abroad. An Erasmus lecture in a language you are still building takes all the attention you have, and the transcript is where the terminology lands afterwards, at your own pace.
What recording does not do
Recording runs through the microphone, so you grant access once and confirm a short permission checklist before the first one. On the web the tab stays open while the audio uploads, and closing it early loses the recording.
Transcribing and generating happen online. A basement lecture hall with no signal means the material appears once you are back on a connection.
Free to start
The free plan includes flashcards, quizzes and spaced repetition, plus a monthly allowance of AI generations, which is what a recording draws on. The pricing page sets out what each plan includes, and the app shows the price where you live.
Questions and answers
Yes. Every card and every line of the summary is editable, so a name or term goes in exactly as your slides write it. Max, your AI tutor, shows you the transcript passage a card came from.
It records through your device's microphone, so whatever the microphone can hear ends up in the transcript. Headphones in, and it hears nothing.
That depends on your university and often on the individual lecturer, so ask before the first one. Studyflash shows a permission checklist before you record, but the permission itself is between you and the people in the room.
Both, on Premium. A mock exam covers the whole course, so it draws on the recording alongside the slides and every deck in that course, and a podcast is two voices discussing the material, streamed rather than downloaded, so it needs a connection.
The transcript sits in your course as a source Max has read, so the answer comes back out of your own lecture. Chatting with Max is unlimited on every plan. On the free plan too, he builds cards or a quiz from that lecture when you ask.