Make flashcards from a PDF
Upload a lecture PDF and Smara writes the deck for you — the kind of cards you'd make yourself if you had the evening free, sourced only from your own material.
How it works
You upload the PDF (lecture slides, your own notes, a textbook chapter). Smara reads the actual text, skips the administrative pages, and writes flashcards from the content — plain question-and-answer cards, plus cloze deletions where a fill-in-the-blank fits the material better. Diagrams and figures found in the PDF are extracted and attached to the cards they belong to.
Every card keeps a reference to the page it came from, so you can check anything against the source. Cards land in a normal deck: edit them, delete the weak ones, add your own. Generation runs in the background and a typical lecture takes a minute or two.
Then the schedule takes over
The point of the deck is reviewing it. Cards go through spaced repetition (SM-2 by default) — grade each one from Again to Easy and it comes back right around when you'd start to forget it. Studying is free and unlimited, works offline, and there is a built-in tutor if a card doesn't click. More on how the scheduling works →
Honest limits
The PDF needs real text — scanned image-only PDFs aren't supported yet. Cards are AI-written from your material, so skim a new deck once and prune anything you wouldn't have written yourself; the page references make that quick. The free plan includes 10 generations a month with PDFs up to 25 MB, which is enough to study a course honestly before deciding if Pro is worth it.
Your cards stay yours
Decks export as real Anki packages (.apkg), CSV, or TSV — and Anki decks import in the other direction, cloze cards included. If you leave, your work comes with you.