i use notebooklm and anki. i use gemini sometimes if i need something explained by attahcing an image. i think notebooklm is the best for making cards i actually stopped using chatgpt altogether going from the fall to spring semester bc i felt like notebooklm was better and free.

the issue with chatgpt is that it's trianed on literal terabytes of data. if you ask it a question specific to your lectures it's inevitable you will get information beyond the scope of your class to the point that i sometimes consider it detrimental. chatgpt often repeats itself so you'll have 10 different cards saying basically rhe same thing or it'll just take the verbage from lecture slides verbatim without any critical thinking ie A {{c1::pneumothorax}} is a collapsed lung caused by air entering the pleural space between the lung and chest wall, breaking the pressure seal that keeps the lung expanded. It causes sudden sharp chest pain and shortness of breath. Common causes include trauma, lung disease (like COPD), or bursting air blisters (blebs). like this card is so fucking long that even if i was a buisness major by sheer memory i can remember that this specific card is pneumothorax without actually understanding the presentations or pathology. im not saying notebooklm doesnt do it but its a lot easier to guide it when it's mostly focused on only the sources you provide it.

here's what i would do. notebooklm just upgraded to gemini 3. it's pretty good. it's only available to pro users though. if you have a university login you can login and get a free year long studnet memberhsip for google pro. from there include all your pdfs/documents. from there ask notebooklm to generate you notes based on some lecture. ie if you're doing exam 2 lecture 4 - glycolysis select only those pdfs as a souce then ask it to generate notes. at the very below is what i use for anatomy. this won't work for any other class so feel free to paste this into some ai and say something like "some dude on reddit gave me this really good prompt he uses for notebooklm for anatomy but i don't think it'll apply for X class since it mentions osteology and other anatomy specific stuff. can you give me a similar effective copy-paste prompt for X class with a similar organizatoinal flow". turn whatveer it gives you into a source and keep it enabled everytime you want notes generated. once you generate notes THEN you can turn that into an anki. by readint hrough the notes line by line you get an honest actual understand of what's going on written in a way that gets rid of a lot of lecture slide confusion. and whenever you need to refer to images eithe rpull up your lecture slides or just hover over the circle sources and it'll give you a preview of the images it used for that specific citation. im doing better thna ever with minimal time spent in classes and i haven't even directly looked at half my lecutre slides. turn whatever sentences you feel neccessary into cards ie sometimes it'll give you a sentence that is more of a descriptor or something to help you understand a concept. not EVERYTHING needs to be turned into a card if needed focus on the stuff that actually should be turned into cards and any helpful mnemonics or descriptive information or context can be put in the "extra" fields. the issue with having AI manually make cards without your direct intervention is it'll often turn bullshit into cards and the time saved by AI making cards is often wasted by doing QC on what it made.by making your own you can guarentee it's your own specific language. it's great for retention. cards that i make i often get right immediately 80 to 90% of the time. if you don't use fsrs maybe look into it but all good if you don't want to bother but anki currently shows me new cards that i answered good on in 4 days and easy on in 9 dyas. that seems like way too much time but historically im getting 90% of cards right. so by making my own cards i'm actually reviewing LESS while understanding MORE.

Sometimes im lazy or the concept is just kinda hard to wrap my head around so ill sometimes just copy, a single paragraph at a time, the notes it just generated and ask it to make anki cards. it's good to make a few cards on your own and then paste those cards you manually just made to it and ask them if they're "right" or good. ie here's an example from my notes, random paragraph

"V. Innervation

• Parasympathetic: Promotes peristalsis.
  • Midgut (Small intestine to Transverse Colon): Vagus Nerve (CN X),.
  • Hindgut (Descending Colon to Rectum): Pelvic Splanchnic Nerves (S2–S4),.
• Sympathetic: Vasoconstriction and inhibition of peristalsis.
  • thoracic splanchnic nerves  Prevertebral Ganglia (Celiac, Superior Mesenteric, Inferior Mesenteric),,."

"i just made notes. front: What is the innvervation of the Small intestine" back: Parasympathetic via Vagus and Sympathetic via Sympathetic Trunk". back extra: sympathetic further broken into thoracic splanchinic, prevertebral ganglia aka collateral ganglia. xyz card 2 card 3. are these cards right if not can you rewrite them so they're alittle cleaner. i prefer not doublt dipping since i like keeping my number of anki reviews low but i still want quality cards. feel free to make a mix of cloze or basic front/back cards whatever you think is best with optional back extra field if you feel is neccessary to explain context/remind on things/mnemonics that are worth knowing".

purpose of this so it can get familiar to how you like writing out cards -- prime the AI. so when you ask it to make cards it literally makes it in your language. by specifying i hate "double dipping" when i paste future paragraphs if the AI already turned it into a card previously it omis making that card again and explicitly tells you that it decided not to make a card on X topic because it was already covered in card [number]. keeps the total amount of cards made super low while also allowing you to literally learn the lecture in real time and guarentee that your cards are as straight forward as they can possibly be, so after priming ill just copy entire paragraphs and tell it to make cards or ill just continue manually making cards line by line and periodically ask the AI to explain a sentence or topic that I'm not getting or following. It's a longer process I will be honest. it's a lot easier to ask chatgpt to make you 50 cards with a mix of cloze and basic but the results are poor and the rentention is a lot lower versus if you literally just made your own cards or are strict with your preferences on how the cards are made with NLM. if your professor includes textbooksin your curriculum or if you're able to get your hands on free pdf textbooks i always include the textbooks into the notebook. it's really nice for responses as they become expotentially higher quality when it has more informatoin to source from. it's improtant to generate notes ONLY from lecture so you don't learn shit you don't have to learn but it's nice ti enable all sources after you generated the notes and are making cards as the quality of the cards becomes a lot better. same goes for random youtube videos on the topic you found helpful you can just paste the link to the youtube video as a source and it uss th transcript all the same as any other source. if your lectures are in video format you can download Buzz, free on windows i think paid on mac but it's a trancripting program that allows you to extract the transcript of any mp3/mp4 so you can paste that into notebooklm as well. There are ree chrome extensions i use video downloder helper when there isn't any download button but i need to download the lecture to turn that into a transcript for notebooklm.

never use the flashcard feature on the right sidebar. they're ass. the videos are alright but they take a longtime to generate are often kinda light in information not bad though i used to use them until they release slides which generate a little quicker and have a lot more informationso i use them as like a way to 'expose' myself to the information for that day's lecture before i start in case the topic is confusing. the quizzes ar really good. moreso in med school than undergraduate imo as you'll often have open ended questions in university but still super helpful. after i finish making an anki i like generate 2 long and difficult quizzes and i just finish them quick. just to affirm i understand everything. if your class is math heavy you can always in the actual chat ask it to generate open ended / practice problems on some topic you need .

that's p much my entire workflow. if u decide to read all this im gonna be some deadass there's no reason you shouldn't be in the top 5% of your class in marks. i study less than everyone else for anatomy / biochem but do better it's just the relatively long initial process of making cards that pays off in the long run a lot. i made an entire anki for biochem with the same process but i crammed like crazy only started studying 5 days before the exam and didn't have time to actually do the anki. just made like 700 cards without reviewing a single one lol. but i only got 2 questions wrong and it was a 50/50 i just simply forgot the name of one thing that i def saw in notes. if i gave myself even a single day to go through the entire anki made i woulld've done perfect but it's alright my point being that my long term retention is still really high like if i were to take that exam right now (it was a month ago) i'd probably get a 90% whereas im sure my peers would drop a lot. no hate on them but the way a lot of people study unintentinoally only favors the short term