Flashcards drill your own material rather than someone else's summary of the topic. You can write a deck yourself on every plan, Free and Sync included. Having the AI make one from the note is part of the Pro and Lifetime plans, like AI quizzes, mind maps and slide decks, on Lifetime through your own API key. You can edit any deck, the AI's included.
Creating a deck
Open the note you want to study. On desktop, type / and choose Flashcards, or choose it from Apps in the toolbar. On mobile, open the apps group on the toolbar above the keyboard and choose Flashcards. A card appears in the note. Click or tap it and choose Create flashcards, and ten study cards are made from the note content, the PDFs in it included. Create by hand, under it, opens an empty deck to write instead.
You can close the dialog or the sheet while they are made. The card says Working on flashcards until the deck is ready, and Grape tells you when it is, see Get notified when the AI is done. On desktop, Cancel in the dialog stops it.
Making a deck by hand
On Free and Sync, the dialog or the sheet the card opens leads with Create by hand, with a small Let AI make it from your note link under it that says what the Pro plan adds. On Pro and Lifetime, Create by hand sits under Create flashcards.
The deck is a list of cards. Write the question or term on the Front and the answer or definition on the Back, choose Add card for the next one, and remove a card you no longer want with the bin on it. Choose Save when you are done, the tick at the top of the sheet on mobile. On desktop, Command or Control with Enter saves from anywhere in the list.
A card left blank on both sides is dropped when you save. A card with only one side written stops the save until you finish it or clear it.
Editing a deck
Open the flashcards from the card in the note and choose Edit, the pencil at the top of the dialog on desktop or of the sheet on mobile. The deck opens in the same list, whether you wrote it or the AI did, so you can fix a muddy card, add the one it missed or take out the ones you already know. Editing works on every plan, so a deck made on Pro stays yours to change on Free.
Reviewing
Open the flashcards from the card in the note. Click or tap a card to flip it, and step through the deck with the arrows. The deck stays attached to the note, so the day before the exam it is exactly where the material is.
Regenerating
A deck the AI made mirrors the note at the moment you generate. If the note has grown since, generate again for a fresh deck, or add the cards it is missing yourself with Edit.
Notes with PDFs
A note can be mostly a PDF: drop in the lecture slides or a chapter and the cards come from what it says, picked from across all of its pages rather than the first few. Grape reads the PDF once on your device and keeps its text, so the quiz and the mind map you make next read the same text without reading the file again. See How Grape reads the PDFs in your notes.
Getting better cards
The cards come from the note, so a note with clear headings and complete sentences produces a better deck than a wall of abbreviations. If a card comes out muddy, the fix is usually one clearer paragraph in the note, or one clearer sentence on the card with Edit.
The other study tools
The same notes can become a quiz or a mind map, each built for a different kind of studying, and a slide deck when you have to present them. All three can be made by hand too.