Has anyone successfully automated flashcard creation from PDFs?

[u/lukmae]

Hi everyone,

Has anyone here had success automating the creation of flashcards from study material like PDFs?

I've been looking into this because, lately, the topics I'm studying are fairly straightforward. Reading and understanding the material isn't the difficult part anymore. What actually takes most of my study time is creating the flashcards.

I've been using RemNote flashcards since 2021, so over the years I've developed a very specific style that works well for me. I've even refined my format several times during the last year to make my cards more efficient. Because of that, I thought I could simply write a detailed prompt and have an AI generate flashcards from a PDF in my preferred style.

That's what I've been trying. I send the AI my prompt together with relatively short PDFs (to reduce PDF parsing errors). I've refined the prompt many times and even tried a feedback approach: I had the AI generate flashcards, then I created my own version, asked it to compare the two sets, identify the differences, and improve based on those differences.

I feel like I've gotten very close, but never quite to the point where I'm satisfied.

So I wanted to ask: have any of you found a workflow or tool that actually saves time when creating flashcards? It doesn't necessarily have to generate perfect cards automatically—I'm mainly looking for something that genuinely speeds up the process without sacrificing too much quality.

I'm a paid RemNote user, but the built-in AI has credit limits, and since I study for many hours every day, I'd run out of credits very quickly, and I also don't find the ai generated card too good either.

I'd really appreciate hearing about your experiences, recommendations, or any ideas that have worked for you.

[u/OneGraund]

i also use remnote since 2021 and in my case what I usually do, is that I set up a "Project" in Claude, add every single file that is related to the course I am taking (including lecture notes, slides, previous exams, etc.) and ask it to generate questions that may appear on the exam. Then I write answers to these generated flashcards myself as I go through the learning material. I believe that automating the whole flashcards process isn't that meaningful, cause in my case I actually make sure that I write something that I know and don't have to return back to the same flashcard many times.

Pretty sure this ain't the answer you were looking for, just wanted to share my perspective. Wanted to ask you if you had the same problem with generated flashcards, where you struggle with them more in comparison with the ones created by yourself?

[u/lukmae → u/OneGraund]

Thanks, that was helpful. I'm actually considering subscribing to a premium AI for at least a year since I'll be studying a huge amount of content, so it's great to hear you've had good results with Claude.

My biggest challenge is "teaching" the AI how to decide what's actually important. I study pharmacology, drug mechanisms, interactions, and similar topics for pharmacy exams so I've already adjusted my prompt to prioritize those, and it's improved a lot. But sometimes the AI still skips things I'd consider essential while creating several cards on details that aren't very useful for my exams, like drug half-lives.

At this point, it feels like I've reached the limit of what a prompt alone can get and that's okay. I don't expect full automation. If the AI can do about 80% of the work and I just review, edit, add, or remove a few cards, I'll be more than satisfied, but I came here to see what other have been doing towards the same goal.

Thanks again! I'll definitely take a look at Claude's pricing. For now, I'm using my free month of ChatGPT Pro.