Anki is where you review. The bottleneck is everything that happens before that: deciding what is worth memorising, writing it as a card, and getting it into the right deck. This page compares the three ways to do that, including the one most guides skip.
Spaced repetition works. That part is settled, and it is why Anki has survived for two decades with an interface that looks like a spreadsheet.
The part that breaks is upstream. You read an article, watch a lecture, work through a PDF chapter, and you know exactly which three sentences are worth keeping. Then you have to open the editor, type a front, type a back, tag it, pick the deck, and do it thirty more times. Most people stop after card five, and the material quietly dies in a browser tab.
So the real question is not "how do I make Anki cards faster" but "which step am I willing to give up". There are three answers, and they are not equally good.
| Approach | How it works | Where it hurts |
|---|---|---|
| Write them yourself | Read the source, decide what matters, type each front and back in the Anki editor. | Best card quality you will ever get, and the slowest — roughly 5 to 15 minutes per page of dense material. The act of writing is also part of the learning, which is the honest argument for it. |
| Generate, then export | Paste text or upload a file to an AI generator, get a CSV or APKG, download it, then File → Import and map the fields. | Fast to generate, then the work comes back: file handling, column mapping, re-importing an updated deck, and duplicates every time you run it again on the same chapter. |
| Generate, then write directly | The generator talks to desktop Anki through AnkiConnect and adds notes to the deck you picked, in place. | Requires the free AnkiConnect add-on and desktop Anki running. In exchange there is no file to manage and no import step to get wrong. |
The first two are what most guides describe. The third is the one people rarely mention, and it is the reason this page exists.
AnkiConnect is a free add-on for desktop Anki. It opens a local port and accepts commands like "add this note to this deck with these tags". That is the whole mechanism — no cloud service, no sync account, no file.
Once a tool can call it, three annoying things disappear:
chapter3-final-v2.apkg files you are afraid to delete.The honest trade-off: this only works on desktop Anki with the add-on installed and Anki open. If you study exclusively on your phone, the export route is still the only route. AnkiWeb sync then carries the cards to mobile in the usual way.
Selection is the easy case: you highlight a paragraph, you get a card or three. The failure mode is a whole page, where the model happily produces forty cards about navigation menus and cookie notices. Select first, generate second.
Text-native PDFs work. Scanned PDFs need OCR before anything else, and slide decks are mostly headings with three words of context — the cards will be thin unless you feed the speaker notes too. Long documents are better split by chapter, which also keeps the resulting deck reviewable.
This depends entirely on captions. A video with a caption track can be turned into cards that stay faithful to what was said. A video without one cannot, and a tool that claims otherwise is inventing content. Visual-only material — diagrams, derivations on a whiteboard — is a known gap for transcript-based tools.
AnkiMate is a browser extension that does the third approach: select text on any page (or use the whole page, a PDF, or a YouTube transcript), pick a template, review the generated cards, and write them into a deck through AnkiConnect.
Concretely, it has nine templates tuned by subject: general, medicine for USMLE-style material, GRE vocabulary, language learning, law, programming, reversed vocabulary, list breakdown, and Cloze. Eight are free; Cloze and batch generation are Pro.
Pricing, since this page is also the marketing: three generations per day free, forever, no account required. Pro is $19.9 once — Cloze, batch generation of long articles, and future templates. No subscription, because the AI runs on your device or on your own API key rather than on a server I pay for.
Add to Chrome — Free Add to Edge — Free
AnkiConnect add-on code: 2055492159. Free, made by the Anki community, not by us.
lecture-07 lets you find and fix a bad batch later.None of this requires a tool. The tool only removes the typing.
Yes, if you want cards written directly into your collection. AnkiConnect is a free Anki add-on (code 2055492159) that lets other programs talk to desktop Anki over a local port. Without it you would be back to export files.
Writing happens through AnkiConnect, which runs in desktop Anki. AnkiWeb and AnkiMobile then sync from your desktop as usual, so cards reach your phone the normal way.
Not by default. The extension uses the browser built-in on-device model first. If you choose to paste your own API key, text goes from your browser directly to that provider. The only request that reaches our server is licence activation.
Free tier: three generations per day, and writing cards into Anki is always free and unlimited. Pro is a one-time $19.9 that unlocks Cloze cards, batch generation and future templates. No subscription.
An add-on runs inside Anki and works on files you already have. This runs in the browser and works on what you are reading right now — a page, a PDF viewer, a video with captions — then writes the result back through AnkiConnect. Different starting point, same destination.
Full feature list and pricing → · Compare with a CSV-export workflow →