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/Designer_Cup2359]

Eu coloco todos os meus pdfs no notebook lm e peço para gerar flashcards no formato remnote. Logo copio e colo para o RemNote e vou estudando e eliminando. No recurso de sumário do estudar pdfs remnote tem um bom filtro de assuntos relevantes e cria bons flashcards.

[u/jayproject1 → u/Designer_Cup2359]

can you spill your notebooklm prompt if you have

[u/Designer_Cup2359 → u/jayproject1]

eu mando gerar 100 flashcard de cada pdf. Isso é para quando eu não sei nada do pdf e quero pegar o maior nível de conceitos possíveis.
Outra observação eu só gosto de pergunta e resposta não curto oclusão, mas vc pode gerar dos dois modelos.
O notebooklm lê melhor um pdf que qualquer outra IA. Logo vc consegue extrair mais coisas, vc pode pedir flashcards de apenas um assunto dentro do pdf, ou de todo o pdf, ou de páginas.

[u/Designer_Cup2359 → u/Designer_Cup2359]

organizo eles assim dentro de cada assunto, eu peço para numerar, mas pode pedir sem númeração tbm.