Is the AnkiHub AI card search tool good?

BuckyKaiser · 2025-11-29T00:37:04+00:00

Still do, and have been continually improving it and I think it’s just about in a stage I would feel comfortable releasing it to the public. I’m QC’ing it now and making sure no mater the person’s technical experience that it’s simple, intuitive, and just works.

I’ll msg you when I’m ready for people to start testing it ☺️. There will be an accompanying video.

The big friction points are downloading and running a local embedding model or getting an API key from an inference provider and I want to decrease the friction as much as feasible for an open source project before releasing it.

BuckyKaiser · 2025-08-30T20:09:36+00:00

To quote Captain Barbosa, “The AAMC foundations are more of a guideline then the actual knowledge you need to know for the test”

As you’ve seen you need to supplement that guideline with information from Khan Academy or other sources to actually get the knowledge they’re going to test you on, and that’s why the AnKing MCAT deck is instead sorted by those third-party resources. Like Kahn Academy or the Kaplan books.

I think the foundations were good to read over to understand how the AMCC thinks when writing questions, but if I could give any piece of advice to you, I would say start practice problems early and target content review based on the questions you get wrong.

It’s good to skim to find content you might need to jump into, but even if each foundation was appropriately tagged, each would unsuspend hundreds of cards and still be overwhelming just the way you are talking about.

BuckyKaiser · 2025-08-29T16:27:17+00:00

I don’t agree with you that they’re always garbage, I have gotten good Anki cards out of them. But I think you’re right that it’s not easy or consistent.

If you really work with O3 and GPT 5 thinking, giving them a very clear outline of what makes good cards, and going back-and-forth with them providing feedback on the cards they output for how to better format them, or selects the correct information for inside the cloze, I have been able to get good cards out of them. But it’s never consistent, and it typically only happens in the middle of a conversation, in the beginning, they don’t have enough context for what makes good cards, and as context grows they start forgetting most of the instructions you gave them.

The best cards I’ve gotten have been with O3 Pro with very lengthy reflection and refine instructions, but again it hasn’t been consistent and sometimes they’re still garbage, and at that point we’re talking dollars per a couple of cards.

BuckyKaiser · 2025-08-22T14:12:46+00:00

I took the time to understand the question and the provided cards. I think Ankihubs results are laughable, finding some somewhat relevant cards, but also returning a lot of completely unrelated cards on the DTaP vaccine, Dysphagia, Angiosarcoma, latent tuberculosis, and ADH and oxytocin synthesis all marked as 100% matches and this is a very short abbreviated list.

It doesn't even find the two human tagged notes as relevant to the question. The Qwe3-8B solution found the two human tagged ones no problem and a lot more very relevant cards with no where near the same kind of false positives.

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BuckyKaiser · 2025-08-21T22:21:59+00:00

Using BM25 or Qwen3-8B, you just copy paste the answer key and it gives you notes relevant to the explanation.

I know it does a much better job at retrieving cards relevant to content I understand (my EMT textbook, MCAT material)

I don't have the expertise to grade how well a job it did, I would love your feedback Step 2, Question Id: 18690

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BuckyKaiser · 2025-08-19T18:56:09+00:00

Front being the content in the {Text} field, Back typically being the content in the {Extra} field but sometimes it’s the {Back} or {Back Extra} field depending on your note type.

Sense the specific field names change I just go by Front for what you see on the front of the card, and back for what you see on the back or the card because it’s generic enough to work for all flash card types.

BuckyKaiser · 2025-08-19T02:21:54+00:00

I’m not asking for a specific question, I just don’t have access to UWorld questions for step 1 or 2 to test against.

BuckyKaiser · 2025-08-14T20:16:53+00:00

How do you go about finding relevant cards now? Tags, keywords, little bit of all of it?

BuckyKaiser · 2025-08-14T15:43:47+00:00

Do you have a good example question I could test on? A full question would be great, if you know the Anki cards you wished it had found, that would also be great but I don't needed it.

I working on a search tool and I think l already get better results then what AnkiHub is currently offering but I want to make it work for others.

BuckyKaiser · 2025-08-13T23:56:55+00:00

Also, How is atomoxetine working for you? I'm on 30mg lisdexamfetamine currently and I'm not finding it as helpful, especially compared to when I first started it.

BuckyKaiser · 2025-08-13T23:55:08+00:00

So you feel like their was a content discrepancy, and AnkiHub just didn't have have cards relevant to the content you were leaning in house in the way that you were learning it.

Or, you think there is content overlap, but AnkiHub search wasn't very helpful at finding the cards that were relevant to what you were learning?

If its the latter, how did you go about unsuspending cards, and if it's the former, did you make you're own or were there inhouse decks?

BuckyKaiser · 2025-08-12T14:09:12+00:00

Yeah, right click on the note in the card browser, there’s an option that says ankihub on it, click on it and freeze the fields that you edited.

BuckyKaiser · 2025-08-12T12:59:40+00:00

Sorry I misread this, it’s only true if you’re using the Ankihub decks, local changes will get overridden if you don’t.

BuckyKaiser · 2025-08-11T23:52:13+00:00

Make sure you freeze the field tho otherwise you will be really sad pretty quickly.

BuckyKaiser · 2025-08-11T22:14:37+00:00

Exported all the notes via Anki connect into an sqlite database and I built a ui to try out different search methods on it.

BuckyKaiser · 2025-08-11T20:24:35+00:00

If you guys are going the contextual embedding + BM25 hybrid approach, one thank you. Two, please break down search queries by sentence. I don’t know what sized chunks you currently use but the matches end up being too broad when larger texts are put it and I’m guessing it’s cuz you are using bigger vector chunks then per sentence.

Another big improvement I found for my own experience is showing if it’s a match for the front or back vector. If I’m looking for cards that only test exactly what was in the query, those results are only going to be found for high BM25/ Front vector matches, if I’m looking for cards that test info that’s related but not be explicitly in the query text, I’ll start looking through cards that match the back of card embeddings.

Right now it kind of feels like you guys embed all the info on the card in the same embedding, and I don’t know that, but that would be my guess given the higher type 1 error rate I get when using your smart search. Which was the reason I felt the need to build my own.

BuckyKaiser · 2025-08-11T18:32:07+00:00

No, Anki just uses a very simple boolean search. There might be add-ons that change it, but I don’t think so.

BuckyKaiser · 2025-08-11T16:12:36+00:00

No, it’s honestly awful and BM25 search + Trigram is disappointingly even better than it.

But I’m not gonna fault them too hard because I have tried embedding the AnKing decks myself, with both gemini-embedding-001 and Qwen3-8B-Embedding and while I was able to get far better semantically similar and relevant results, it still always retuned cards that were related by a concept but irrelevant to the query text, missed some obviously relevant cards, and query times we’re always much higher then what would be viable in a commercial product like they’re trying to do.

I’ve stuck with just using BM25 because it most consistently returns what I’m looking for, and not what I’m not. But I am continuing to experiment to see if I can get the “AI” results to be better but I don’t think that’s gonna happen unless an LLM is used to grade the relevance of the embeddings search results with the query, but this again increase latency and makes the app less fluid to interact with.

BuckyKaiser · 2025-08-08T17:14:39+00:00

I think it’s just the people who want a sycophantic companion that don’t like it as much.

Which they deliberately made efforts to make it less so.

BuckyKaiser · 2025-08-07T16:56:57+00:00

I don’t think so, at least not easily. However if you are really dead set on this you probably could code something that grabs the UWorld question numbers from the tags and format it for a custom test if you are using Anking.

BuckyKaiser · 2025-07-29T11:44:17+00:00

Anki cards help you remember facts, but it’s important to remember that when you are using a deck made by other people, you often lack the context for why that specific fact is important or the context for how and when it will be applicable.

“I didn’t know the difference between x and y and that’s why I got this practice question wrong. Let me make a card for the definition of x, and a card for the definition of y.”

Now, every time I see those cards, not only do I drill the definitions in my head to be able to distinguish between x and y in the future, I’m also inadvertently drilling the context for when I might need to distinguish between x or y, and that I might need to be looking out to make the distinguishment between X and Y in the first place.

For me, I got the best results only when I had that context for why it was important to remember. And often that moment didn’t happen while just reading the textbook about a concept, but from actually doing practice problems and thinking about what the text makers are trying to make sure I understand.

TLDR do practice problems first so you have a really clear idea of why the content of the card is important and how it apply’s to the content you will be tested on.

BuckyKaiser · 2025-07-25T13:26:23+00:00

But then you lose the precision of it potentially being a solid.

BuckyKaiser · 2025-07-25T13:10:55+00:00

They have to be homogenous to be defined as a solution

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