Both of us are big Anki users but often find that writing the cards can be fairly dull. We built this to make it easy to convert PDFs into Anki cards.
Lowering the energy barrier to using Anki and making it more broadly accessible seems important. However, getting practice writing your own cards is important for learning what type of cards do / don't work so don't just rely on this!
We're too lazy to host this for you so we've set this up as a locally hosted thing. There's a few things you need to install.
Make sure you have conda and then run
conda env create -f environment.yml
source activate anki_proj
We use Google Cloud to extract the highlighted segments before passing them into a PDF reader as we found that PDF readers were no good at getting highlighted chunks. Follow the instructions at the Google Cloud API.
We create the cards using OpenAI's GPT. You need to have a key in your environment called OPENAI_API_KEY. You can do this by either by pasting in your command line
export OPENAI_API_KEY="<YOUR SECRET KEY>"
or opening your shell configuration file (most often ~/.bashrc) and pasting the export
line into there.
Once the cards are generated you can select which ones you want to keep and edit the questions and answers before exporting them.
To make life easier, we have two convenience modes for exporting your anki cards.
First of all, we have two buttons at the bottom of the flask webpage.
Get Txt File writes the results to a line-separated file called anki_cards.txt.
The other button uses the Anki Connect app to directly create cards. To set
this up, follow the link, then go into the text_to_anki.py file, change the DECK_NAME
variable to your desired deck and run it.
To run this app, simply run
flask --app app run
which will host the app locally. Then open http://127.0.0.1:5000.
For testing it out, we provide a convenient pdf called test_pdf.pdf. It's a fairly big PDF, so it'll take about 30s to a minute to run. Enjoy learning about Passover!
We provide some example demos in the demo_pdfs folder. Take a look at the highlighting pattern there and mess around with it!
Keep in mind, when you highlight a section of text, you bring a lot of context into it. GPT does not have this context! It's best if you highlight one or two sentences that have very clear, unambiguous meaning. You can also unselect and edit question/answer pairs to fine tune the card before uploading to Anki.
If you highlight an entire page, I have no idea what it'll do. Probably something dumb.
If you highlight just a few words, GPT decides to fill things in for you. For example, passing the single line kill the kernel and rerun all cells will inexplicably generate 20 cards about machine learning. Maybe a better prompt would fix this but we haven't found it yet.
You probably have to correct the extracted outputs from equations. PDF readers don't always extract math correctly.