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.
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. Images will be supported in the near future!
After you click the button, RemNote will generate a set of flashcards with the same settings you used last time you generated flashcards.
On the left, you'll see a preview of the generated Rems that will be added to your document. If you're happy with these cards, you can uncheck any cards that you don't want to add to your knowledge base and then choose Save Cards & Keep Text or Save & Replace Text, depending on whether you want to retain the text you pasted in your document or completely replace it with the cards.
Otherwise, you can use the options on the right 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.
Amount of Cards: If there are overall more cards than you want and you'd prefer not to spend so much time selecting the ones you like best, you can lower this slider to halve or quarter the target number of cards.
Advanced Settings / Model Kind: By default a large model (at this time, Claude Sonnet 3.5) 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.
Advanced Settings / Custom Instructions: Add instructions here about what you're studying, what kinds of flashcards you want, and so on – they'll be passed directly to the model.
Adjust Cards: In contrast to Custom Instructions, which you can use to provide general information about what sorts of flashcards you want, use this field to make changes on the fly to the set of cards that have already been generated for this particular passage. For instance, in the above example, we can quickly remove the historical details if they're not relevant to our course of study:
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.)
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!