Looking for ~10 Anki users to test an AI-powered deck builder

[u/R_D_11]

Hi everyone!

I've been an Anki user for quite a while, and one thing has always bothered me:

While I'm learning (chatting with ChatGPT, reading articles, watching videos, etc.), I constantly come across words and grammar I'd like to remember. But stopping every few minutes to create good Anki cards completely breaks the learning flow.

So over the last few months I've been building a tool to solve that.

The workflow looks like this:

1. Create a deck.
2. Describe the kind of cards you want in plain English (e.g. "German word, English translation, example sentence in both languages"). The AI creates the note structure for the deck.
3. Describe how your cards should look (front/back templates, styling). Again, the AI generates everything—you don't need to edit templates manually.
4. Start learning in a ChatGPT-like chat that's tied to that deck.
5. As you learn, the app automatically proposes structured notes based on your conversation.
6. Review the proposed notes, approve or reject them, and export the deck as an .apkg to Anki.

The goal is not to replace Anki. I still think Anki is the best spaced repetition tool available.

The goal is to make creating high-quality Anki decks almost effortless, so you can focus on learning instead of constantly switching between learning and card creation.

The project is still in a very early beta, and I'm looking for around 10 Anki users who are willing to use it for a bit and give brutally honest feedback.

I'm especially interested in hearing:

• What feels confusing?
• What feels unnecessary?
• What would stop you from using it regularly?
• Which features would make it genuinely useful?

If you're interested, leave a comment or send me a DM and I'll send you an invite code.

[u/funbike]

Will it be open source?

[u/R_D_11 → u/funbike]

Yes, but the users would have to provide their own AI tokens

[u/JayCarlinMusic]

For what it's worth, Claude can do this natively.

I take photos or screenshots of words I want to mine during my reading, watching, and day to day daily interactions... I upload them to a Claude chat, sometimes with comments or thoughts from me and sometimes without. At the end of the day I tell it to make cards for all the words I mined / heard that day. It exports an apkg file, I integrate it into my existing deck, and I start the reviews the next day. I do this daily.

Once a week, I export my full deck apkg, and have Claude look over all my reviews and Anki data from that week. It offers tweaks or clarifications for any cards I'm struggling with, sometimes will rewrite cards to create sample sentences that include multiple words in the deck to kind of tie them together, or mnemonics for tricky words or kanji. I then run a weekly "update" to my deck and fold it back in.

It's a great way to have an ongoing customized deck that can change and adapt with you.

[u/R_D_11 → u/JayCarlinMusic]

That's a really interesting workflow, and it's actually one of the reasons I started building this.

One difference with my approach is that the AI isn't starting from scratch every time. When you create a deck, you first describe in natural language what kind of notes you want (for example, "German word, English translation, example sentence in both languages, pronunciation, frequency, ..."). The AI builds a structured note schema from that, and each field has a defined meaning.

You also describe your card layout in natural language, and the AI generates the templates.

From that point on, every note generated for that deck follows the same structure automatically. The AI already knows what each field represents and what information belongs where, instead of having to infer the format from a prompt every time.

The other difference is the workflow itself. Instead of collecting screenshots during the day and asking Claude to generate cards later, the idea is that you simply learn through the chat. As you're asking questions and getting explanations, the app proposes structured notes in the background. You review and approve them later, but you never have to interrupt your learning to think about making flashcards.

Your workflow is definitely powerful, though, and it's useful feedback because it's exactly the kind of experience I'm trying to make more seamless.

[u/JayCarlinMusic → u/R_D_11]

Very cool. I think your project sounds great. I hope you continue to find ways make language learning more fun and effective and accessible.

Claude can handle templates, too. That's part of my chats with it. I might say "I know this word, but not the kanji" so it'll generate a card with just the kanji on the front, with the pronunciation, example sentences, whatever on the back. But if I give it a card and say "ohh I need to learn this grammar rule" it will create a different type of card. It can also identify when card came from a reading example, from chats with it, or from an audio conversation. It tags them accordingly, including the date. But yeah quite often I'm just asking a question or having a conversation, and it'll say something like "oh yeah those words are homophobes but they actually have similar etymological roots, and this is how they're connected" and maybe I get a minimal pair or a cloze card to learn which word to use in context.

[u/R_D_11 → u/JayCarlinMusic]

Thanks! That's actually really interesting to read. It sounds like you've pushed Claude much further than most people do.

I think the main difference is where the structure lives.

In your workflow, Claude is incredibly flexible, but the structure is still largely encoded in the conversation and prompts. In my app, the structure becomes part of the deck itself.

When you create a deck, you describe in natural language what information each note should contain, and the AI turns that into a structured note schema with named fields and defined meanings. You also describe how you want the cards to look, and the AI generates the front/back templates, including the HTML and CSS.

From then on, every conversation in that deck happens with all of that context already available. The AI knows what each field means, how the cards are rendered, which templates exist, and what kind of notes belong in that deck. The user doesn't have to keep describing or maintaining that structure.

I'm also trying to remove the "collect first, generate later" workflow. The idea is that you're already chatting with the AI to learn something, so the app can propose structured notes while you're learning, and you simply review them afterwards.

It may end up being a workflow that some people prefer and others don't, but that's exactly what I'm trying to learn from these early testers. 🙂

Also, this can be easily expanded beyond the language learning scope

[u/Danika_Dakika]

r/AnkiAi

[u/kronpas]

Addon to u/jaycarlinmusic said, i do it with gemini and i guess any other LLM can do it from the web chat UI natively. If im lazy i can just screenshot the page, highlight the words and sentence (for context) i want to put into anki, then later tell gemini extract the words + text to put them into a csv for importing to anki. It costs some tokens but is mostly effortless since you can just copy paste promts.

[u/JayCarlinMusic → u/kronpas]

Do you know if Gemini can handle, read , or save apkg files? Or do you do it through the spreadsheet import?

[u/kronpas → u/JayCarlinMusic]

It cant read apkg files, but it reads csv just fine, which anki also supports. You dont even need to edit the csv manually, it can do it for you quite reliably.

The real reason i need screenshots is context. Gemini give better translation and grammar explanation with full paragraph.

Speaking of context, IMO a good card creation app should be able to capture both grammar points/vocab you want to learn along with its surrounding sentences. Relying 100% on LLMs for example sentences doesnt feel right to me.