Creating flashcards is one of the most difficult and time-consuming parts of using RemNote. While you'll almost always get the best results by writing your own flashcards, you may simply not have the time to write your own flashcards on every topic you want to learn. When the choice is between no flashcards or somewhat worse flashcards, automatically generating flashcards using a large language model is a great option.
Generating Flashcards
To start creating flashcards with AI, paste some text you want to learn about, then select it and click the Create AI Cards button on the toolbar.
Note: AI flashcard generation currently cannot read images, so make sure all the information you want to create flashcards on is pasted as text.
After you click the button, a configuration screen opens. Choose your settings (see below), or click Generate Cards Now to generate a set of flashcards with the same settings you used the last time you generated flashcards.
Configuration Options
At the top of the configuration screen, choose whether to generate standard flashcards or a Multiple-Choice Quiz.
The Sections field controls how much of your document is included in generation. Click the edit icon next to it to adjust the range. This can be especially helpful if you have a large text that covers multiple topics, and you only want to focus on one topic for now.
The Level of Detail setting controls how many cards it produces. Each option shows the estimated card count and AI credit cost:
High-level summary: Generates cards from an AI summary of the text. Good for a quick overview of a topic.
Important ideas: Generates cards from the full text, focusing on key concepts. This is the recommended option for most use cases.
Exhaustive detail: Generates cards from the full text with maximum coverage. Best when you want comprehensive flashcard coverage of a topic.
The Generation Options setting gives you these options to tweak the flashcards:
Card Types: Control which types of flashcards the AI is allowed to use.
Card Language: By default, RemNote will try to automatically detect the language used in the pasted text and write flashcards in that language. If this fails for some reason, or you would like your cards in a different language than you were reading in, pick a supported language here.
Model: By default, a large or a medium-sized AI model will be used. If this uses too many AI credits for you, you may be able to get a good result with a smaller model. Smaller models also tend to write more straightforward, factual questions, so in a few cases they may actually be preferable, depending on what you are trying to learn. However, they may also follow instructions less accurately.
The Advanced section lets you:
Add custom instructions to further tweak your cards. You can include information about what you're studying, what kinds of flashcards you want, and so on – they'll be passed directly to the model.
Add cards in a portal: This option below the flashcards turns each Concept in the generated flashcards into a top-level Rem and portals it in to the current document, rather than placing the Concepts directly in the current document. If you expect to see the same topics covered repeatedly in different sources you learn from, this may help you reduce the number of duplicate flashcards accidentally created testing the same thing, and keep all relevant information in one place. (See the portals article linked above for more details.)
Reviewing and Saving Generated Cards
After you click Generate Cards Now, RemNote generates a set of flashcards and shows you a preview. On the right, you'll see the generated cards that will be added to your document. Uncheck any cards you don't want to keep.
Once you choose one of the save options (Save Cards & Keep Text or Save & Replace Text), the generated cards are inserted into your document. From here, you can paste another passage and generate cards from that, start practicing, or edit them just like you could any other flashcards.
The most effective way to use AI flashcards is to treat them as a starting point, rather than as your final set of flashcards on a topic. That's because exactly what prompt on the front of a flashcard is perfectly clear varies from person to person, so it's likely that some of them will be written in a way that slightly confuses you. Feel free to edit the cards as you discover things that could be better!