[HN Gopher] Show HN: Anki AI Utils
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Show HN: Anki AI Utils
Hi hn, I am nearly at the end of medical school so it is time I
publish and "advertise" my open source scripts/apps for anki!
Here's the pitch: _Anki AI Utils_ is a suite of AI-powered tools
designed to automatically improve cards you find challenging.
Whether you 're studying medicine, languages, or any complex
subject, these tools can: - _Explain_ difficult concepts with
clear, ChatGPT-generated explanations. - _Illustrate_ key ideas
using Dall-E or Stable Diffusion-generated images. - _Create
mnemonics_ tailored to your memory style, including support for the
Major System. - _Reformulate_ poorly worded cards for clarity and
better retention. _Key Features:_ - _Adaptive Learning:_ Uses
semantic similarity to match cards with relevant examples. -
_Personalized Memory Hooks:_ Builds on your existing mnemonics for
stronger recall. - _Automation Ready:_ Run scripts daily to
enhance cards you struggled with. - _Universal Compatibility:_
Works across all Anki clients (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS).
_Example:_ For a flashcard about febrile seizures, Anki AI Utils
can: - Generate a _Dall-E illustration_ of a toddler holding a
teacup next to a fireplace. - Create _mnemonics_ like "A child
stumbles near the fire, dances symmetrically, has one strike, and
fewer than three fires." - Provide an _explanation_ of why febrile
seizures occur and their diagnostic criteria. _Call for
Contributors:_ This project is battle-tested but needs help to
become a polished Anki addon. If you're a developer or enthusiast,
join us to make these tools more accessible! _Check out my other
projects on GitHub:_ [Anki AI
Utils](https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub) Transform your
Anki experience with AI--because learning should be smarter, not
harder.
Author : Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe
Score : 204 points
Date : 2024-12-28 21:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| vergessenmir wrote:
| I used to be heavy Anki user but I find the setup a little hard
| to follow.
|
| The image generation can do with ComfyUI integration. This will
| expand the illustration options beyond stable diffusion. It will
| also allow for more options within stable diffusion too.
|
| I might raise a PR tomorrow if I have the time.
| Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote:
| Thanks for the interest! The idea was to fully automate the
| process of creating illustrations for the failed cards of the
| day based on few shot prompting alone, indeed adding support
| for external API like ComfyUI would help a lot. Maybe
| especially for finetunes on specific subjets I guess?
| vunderba wrote:
| Very cool. I actually built an app called _" Johnny Mnemonic"_
| around 5 years ago that generated a mnemonic sentence given a
| list of terms when I was studying for my EMT license. At the time
| I leveraged a simple n-gram markov model that I based off the
| publicly available Cornell Movie script database.
|
| I added a couple settings like word order(matters: colors of the
| rainbow, doesn't matter: bones of the skull), anagram vs
| sentence, etc. At the time the biggest difficulty wasn't
| necessarily generating a coherent sentence - it was ensuring the
| "novelty" of the mnemonic. The less surprising the less likely
| its going to stick.
|
| Fun little tidbit - by adding a "NSFW" flag - I made it so the
| markov chain would heavily weight racy/saucy/lewd words. End
| result, _VERY VERY_ evocative mnemonics that were completely and
| utterly incapable of being shared.
|
| Demo:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTAbVBOMdbk
| wheelsjr wrote:
| I'm a simple man, I see Anki, I upvote
| bravura wrote:
| If I am not an Anki user (yet) but want to create an Anki deck
| from scratch for something I am trying to learn, should I use
| your tool?
| Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote:
| I am tempted to say yes, but in truthfulness it really depends
| on a lot of details. If we are just talking about the card
| creation phase, then I recommend other tools I made, especially
| voice 2 Anki (posted on hn at the same time but has not taken
| off for some reason :) ) If we are talking about the actual
| learning and memorizing phase, then yes, I think those tools
| are valuable. But that being said, I'm also sure there are some
| edge cases of very specifically weird things that do not end up
| very suited for those tools.
| kreetx wrote:
| That's fair advice! Creating cards is also learning, so if
| you generate content using LLMs instead then you'll be
| missing out.
| noduerme wrote:
| Cool!
|
| Slightly off topic, but maybe an idea for someone to pursue... I
| figured out at a very early age that I could not memorize text in
| a script, or poetry, or even flashcards very well. But because I
| started playing piano at a very early age, somehow I could
| remember song lyrics verbatim. I could probably sing/recite at
| least 200 CDs worth of lyrics end to end.
|
| When I wanted to learn Spanish, memorizing songs was way more
| helpful than anything else I tried. Even if I didn't understand
| all the words at first, suddenly a lyrical phrase would become
| clear when I heard some of the words in a conversation.
|
| I'm not sure AI is up to writing really memorable songs yet. But
| for those of us with some kind of synesthesia, there could be
| lots of associations that aid memory, like colors, melodies or
| rhythms.
| potro wrote:
| Combination of gpt-4o for lyrics, and Suno for songs made me
| and my wife pretty much stopped listening to regular music over
| last year.
|
| I will try your idea to create a bunch of Spanish and Italian
| (2 foreign languages I was/is learning) songs to see how well
| it would work for me.
| Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote:
| I recommend giving openrouter a try to quickly test multiple
| LLMs. In my experience claude sonnet 3.5 is slightly worse in
| super strict rule adherence but way better at wordplays than
| 4o so might be better for lyrics. I'm suspecting a secret
| sauce in their secret tokenizer. Don't know yet about
| deepseek-chat, which I'm migrating all my apps too.
| Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote:
| Interesting! Well I think you could use my reformulator script
| for that if you give it examples like "home<>casa" => [lyric
| about casas]. There is a decent chance it works out of the box!
|
| If you try it tell us how it goes in a github issue!
|
| Also I recommend giving openrouter a try to quickly test
| multiple LLMs. In my experience claude sonnet 3.5 is slightly
| worse in super strict rule adherence but way better at
| wordplays than 4o so might be better for lyrics. I'm suspecting
| a secret sauce in their secret tokenizer. Don't know yet about
| deepseek-chat, which I'm migrating all my apps too.
| piazz wrote:
| Wow, so feature rich, congrats on the release. Love that the
| mnemonic generation takes into account your existing memory
| anchors (didn't know that term).
|
| I've actually been working on a similar-ish Anki Plugin for about
| 6 months - it can autogenerate any field via LLM in bulk, as well
| as images and TTS. I'm not explicitly targeting the med school
| use case as much yours (I use it for language learning), and it's
| more GUI centric/geared towards non-technical Anki users who
| don't want to fiddle with a bunch of different API keys etc. Was
| planning to launch HN soon but you beat me to the punch!
|
| https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1531888719 https://smart-
| notes.xyz
| Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote:
| Thank you very much for the kind word but I have to return the
| complement. The app you are making is very feature-rich too,
| seems easy to use and affordable too!
|
| By the way, the new LLM by deepseek called deepseek-chat is
| very good and actually on par with Claude Sonnet 3.5, so you
| might want to give it a try. Openrouter and litellm help a lot.
|
| Also, my projects are not actually aimed at medical learners, I
| just happened to be one! I went to create lengths to make it
| adaptable to any learning scenario and types of learners, etc
| :).
|
| Looking at your project, it seems like there is definitely an
| opportunity for merging efforts. If I get that right, you are
| not implementing few shot learning and a few other features
| like mnemonics and anchors and major system. Do you think there
| is a possibility that wa can talk reusing some of my code and
| features? I can think of ways to make few shot learning
| painless UI wise.
|
| I semi-secretly made that release to -> make my scripts more
| well known to -> help me find people who could help me make it
| available for laymen (I am painfully aware that my features are
| currently only available for nerds although I made great
| efforts to document the whole thing and make good code!).
|
| Honestly, it looks like your awesome project might be the
| opportunity I was looking for! Are you interested in trying to
| make it so good that we can scale and even make (on average)
| better doctors :D!? Please get in touch!
| piazz wrote:
| Thank you :) And, sounds like great fun. Shoot me an email
| (in bio) or let me know how best to get in touch.
| joshdavham wrote:
| Sort of off topic, but I'm always really surprised how well posts
| about spaced repetition and Anki do on HN.
|
| I've been in the spaced repetition community for years and we
| honestly feel extremely niche and small even amongst eachother.
| It's cool to see that the community might be larger than I
| thought.
| all2 wrote:
| I think the idea of "optimized learning" is largely appealing
| to us nerds and electron technicians.
|
| Personally, I would love to have the dopamine response that
| allows for repetitive tasks to become appealing. Unfortunately,
| I've roasted my attention with social media and YouTube.
| Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote:
| For me it grew from a horror of the state I find myself when
| I just *can't* recall something I have known or have to
| lookup things several times. Then the satisfaction of never
| having that feeling again!
| yohannesk wrote:
| I have a question, do you know of any spaced repetition app
| that is free for iOS similar to AnkiDroid?
| Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote:
| The anki website has some UI so you could do the reviews
| there. A bit minimalist though.
| apwell23 wrote:
| aren't multibillion dollar companies like duolingo built on
| spaced repetition. Not sure id call it niche.
| jasdi wrote:
| Cool idea. Making me think of turning all my ChatGPT
| conversations into anki cards.
| bbno4 wrote:
| Respectfully over on r/anki I see maybe 3 or 4 posts a day about
| a new AI tool for Anki. It seems like people are reinventing the
| wheel more than they are using Anki...
|
| However, this seems different.
|
| > automatically improve cards you find challenging.
|
| This is not something I have seen any of those other tools
| attempt to do yet :-)
| Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote:
| Thanks a lot for the kind words! I do admit I partly developed
| a habit of procrastinating _sometimes_ to code but I saw it as
| part of my curriculum too. And the fact that it was open source
| means there is a chance it will help make better doctors
| overall even if it could make me a bit worse! I just need help
| packaging it into an addon or something more user friendly :)
| tsumnia wrote:
| I don't personally use Anki, not for any major reasons or
| ideological disagreements but mostly out of a "I do something
| else to learn" methodology. I've always liked the concept of
| Anki, flashcard learning, and needing some method of "deliberate
| practice" to reinforce the knowledge. My profile and even my
| dissertation explored the idea of practice through Chi and
| Wylie's ICAP framework [1] (interactive, constructive, active, or
| passive respectfully).
|
| I'm particular to the worked example [2] as a tool similar to
| mnemonics. A real world or toy example is presented, and the
| worked example breaks down the step by step actions needed in
| order to "do a thing". For example to represent the "running
| total" use case of variables or a Singleton design pattern, not
| only is it beneficial to know what these techniques "are" but
| also some examples on how the are "used". This is where ICAP
| proposes there are different modes the learner can engage when
| while learning the material. In this light, I think of flashcard
| memorization as a passive learning activity. This doesn't make it
| lesser, only suggesting there are more engaging activities you
| may need to engage in in order to really know a concept.
|
| I think having an LLM generate the various ICAP modes would
| provide additional learning opportunities for those that do use
| Anki. In a similar vein to creating a flashcard, an LLM-driven
| Anki card set could include an "Activity Creation" tool to
| determine which type of learning activity to generate. Computer
| Science for example uses several types of learning activities
| like Parson Problems, Self-Explanation, Output Prediction, and
| simple Typing Exercises to help convey concepts, each with their
| own benefits for targeted learning at a different ICAP modality
| [3]. The activity creation tool in turn would select the
| appropriate modality, the respective activity, and generate a
| 'card' based on that activity.
|
| [1] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1044018.pdf
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worked-example_effect
|
| [3] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED615631.pdf (Yes, this
| one is mine because of course I'd shoehorn my thoughts on
| practice here)
| tpoacher wrote:
| Congrats on your repo. Good to see more fellow medics using
| github!
|
| One comment I would make on your approach to putting anki to work
| for you with medicine, is that it seems to rely on a 'factoids'
| approach, as opposed to a 'systematic' approach. This may not be
| the case with your learning more generally, but this is how your
| anki seems to be structured, so I am keen to make this
| observation: the problem with a 'factoids-based learning'
| approach, which unfortunately is all too common in medical
| education, is that it can backfire spectacularly, especially in
| an unstructured learning environment such as medicine, where
| physicians at ward rounds are much more likely to want to show
| you 'cool stuff' and 'exotic diagnoses', when they should be
| creating an appreciation and understanding of the 'boring' stuff
| first in a systematised manner instead. So you then go to final
| exams knowing all about cool factoids like what "moya moya"
| disease is and how it means 'puff of smoke' in japanese, but
| don't really quite know why right-sided heart failure doesn't
| quite immediately also cause left-sided heart failure directly
| and vice-versa, even though in theory it's all a connected tube.
| (totally random example, I assure you :p ).
|
| One thing I did ages ago when I was finishing my own medical
| school journey (which I later deviated from to become an academic
| / biomedical engineer), was to formulate a "systematic approach
| to medicine". Everybody always talks of needing to have a
| 'system' when you first learn medicine, but nobody ever seems to
| quite know what this system is. So you need to figure out your
| own.
|
| In the context of your systematic learning via Anki, I would
| advise you to formulate your cards such that they address all
| specific aspects of such a systematic approach. One way to do
| this via Anki specifically, would be to create a note type that
| goes through all aspects of that system per condition, but then
| generates specific cards for the parts that you want to extract
| as individual cards (rather than treating the whole note type as
| one mega-card you need to learn). This would not only help you be
| systematic in your learning, but it would also help you flag
| where gaps exist in your knowledge-base, since it would become
| immediately obvious at the point of creating your note, where
| areas of the 'system' are unaddressed.
|
| Here is the link to my old 'system'. Feel free to take
| inspiration from it. (though if you do end up copying / using it
| formally in some capacity, I would appreciate an
| acknowledgement... :) )
|
| https://sr.ht/~tpapastylianou/systematic-approach-to-medicin...
|
| (or
| https://github.com/tpapastylianou/SystematicApproachToMedici...
| if you prefer github).
|
| Hope it helps with your preparation! Good luck with the finals!
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