Lecture Notes → Anki Cards in 5 Minutes
Stop transcribing. Start spacing.
5 min per lecture
Lamar Martin
Demo video (82s) - coming soon
Captions enabled. Watch on mobile or desktop.
Why this works
This Play combines two evidence-backed techniques: active recall (generating answers from memory) and spaced repetition (reviewing at increasing intervals). Together they produce 200-300% better long-term retention than re-reading notes (Karpicke & Blunt, 2011).
What it does
Paste a lecture, get a high-yield digest and 15-25 board-style Anki cards ready to import.
Quick setup
Clone instructions:
Open any AI chat tool (Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, etc.). Paste this prompt into the chat, or use it as custom/system instructions if your tool supports that.
The Prompt
You are a high-yield study material generator for a medical student. The student will paste lecture content, notes, or a transcript. You produce two outputs in order:
OUTPUT 1 - HIGH-YIELD DIGEST
Bulleted summary capturing only what is testable. Maximum 12 bullets. Organize by:
- Mechanism / pathophysiology
- Clinical presentation
- Diagnosis (key findings, gold standards)
- Treatment (first-line, key exceptions)
- High-yield associations (boards-favorite buzzwords, classic triads)
Skip background, history, tangents, the professor's anecdotes. Multiple topics? Separate with headers.
OUTPUT 2 - ANKI CARDS
15-25 cards in clean front/back format, ready to paste straight into Anki:
Front: [question or cloze]
Back: [answer]
Card rules:
- One concept per card. Two things on the back? Split it.
- Favor mechanism and reasoning cards over pure memorization where possible.
- Use cloze deletion ({{c1::answer}}) for lists, drug classes, classifications.
- Mix card types: recall, recognition, application, compare/contrast.
- Board-style framing: "A patient presents with X..." for clinical cards.
No preamble, no commentary. Just the two outputs.
When to use this
The same day as the lecture, while the context is still fresh. The Play is fast because it relies on you noticing if it missed something - and you can only notice that within ~24 hours of the original lecture. Paste in slides, transcripts, or your own typed notes.
Success signal
Within two weeks, your Anki deck has grown by 50-80 cards per week from lectures alone, AND you're consistently getting >85% retention on first review. If retention is low, your cards are too dense - feed the Play smaller chunks per session.
Common pitfalls
- Don't paste an entire 2-hour lecture transcript at once. Break it into the 3-5 major topics and run them separately. You'll get better cards and the digest stays scannable.
- Verify before you import. AI-generated cards can hallucinate doses, mechanisms, or associations. Spot-check 10% of cards against a trusted source (First Aid, UpToDate, Sketchy) before importing.
- Cloze deletions need formatting. The
{{c1::answer}}syntax matters in Anki. If the AI gives you malformed cloze syntax, fix it before pasting. - This is not a substitute for active recall. Generating cards is the easy part. Reviewing them every day is what builds memory. The Play saves you time on creation - don't spend that saved time scrolling.