✨ Why we chose AI-generated flashcards over a community deck library

I'm learning Spanish. Rememberry already let me translate words and save them as flashcards. But when I wanted to study a particular topic, I still had to prepare all the cards myself.

We'd been thinking about that problem for a while. We had even planned an answer: a community deck library.

We were close to building it. Then, during an evening walk, we started questioning whether it was the right idea at all.

Rememberry started with words from the page

Rememberry's early focus was simple: save words and phrases from the page you were reading, then review them later.

The browser extension made it possible to translate a word or phrase directly on a web page, save it, and review it later. Text found elsewhere could be typed into a translation field in the extension window and saved the same way.

The mobile app brought that workflow to my phone. I could look up a word while walking or commuting and save it for later study, while cards and progress stayed in sync with the extension.

That worked well when a word or phrase was already at hand. But sometimes I knew what I wanted to study before I had the words for it.

Spanish irregular verbs were one example. I ran into the same question with themed vocabulary, such as words for an airport, shop, beach, etc: which words and phrases belonged in the deck?

The feature we nearly built

A community deck library seemed like a natural answer. Similar apps, like Anki, already have shared collections. Someone could prepare a useful deck and share it with other learners. As people contributed, the collection would grow.

The idea had been in our backlog for some time, but building it would be a substantial project.

One evening, while my wife and I were walking, we discussed how to build it properly. We kept coming back to one practical concern: it would take a lot of time. How could we deliver the useful part sooner?

We'd already thought about generating cards with AI. Somehow, until that conversation, we hadn't really considered it an alternative to a community deck library.

As we talked, we started to see how much of the original problem it could address. With a community deck library, someone has to have made the deck you need, in your language pair, on your topic, at a suitable level. Even a carefully curated library will have gaps. With AI, you can describe the combination you need and ask for cards to match it.

You could ask for a particular grammar topic or name a context you wanted vocabulary for. You could also use cards you already had as context for generating more.

What first appealed to us as a way to deliver the feature sooner began to look like the direction we actually preferred. We dropped the library idea.

Curated cards still have a clear advantage: someone may have put real care into selecting, organizing, and checking them. But when learners need cards shaped around their own needs, AI generation offers more flexibility.

What I actually used it for

I first used AI generation to make the English-to-Spanish irregular-verb cards I wanted. I could describe the grammar I wanted to practice and ask for a deck instead of entering each form individually.

I also started from a deck I already had. My request was essentially:

Suggest the next 50 cards based on what I already know in this deck.

Rememberry includes the existing cards in the instructions, so the AI can suggest additions based on what's already there. This let me expand a deck I'd been studying without having to come up with every new card myself.

Then there was a small Spanish puzzle book I had, full of crossword-like activities. Looking through it, I realized I didn't know many of the words. I used a picture of one page in the AI chat to generate cards for them.

That experience led to the From uploaded picture option. You attach the picture in your AI chat; Rememberry prepares the instructions, and you paste the completed response back into the app.

By then, the feature was much more interesting to me than a simple topic generator. I could start with a grammar question, a deck I was already studying, or something I happened to have in front of me.

Start with something you want to practice

If there's a topic you've wanted to learn words and phrases for, open Generate Cards in the Rememberry app. Choose the languages, describe what you want to practice, and include the situation, grammar, or level you have in mind.

You can also start from an existing deck or use a picture as the source in your AI chat, as I did with the Spanish puzzle book.

The AI flashcards guide walks through the full process, including how to bring the generated cards back into Rememberry.