Flashcards and Spaced Repetition

Polmi reads the key terms and ideas out of your transcript, turns them into flashcards, and then surfaces each card for review on the day it is due. You study a handful of cards at a time instead of rereading a whole lecture the night before the exam.

What Polmi's flashcards do

Every lecture you transcribe with Polmi comes with a deck. After the transcript and summary are ready, Polmi pulls out the terms, definitions, and core ideas worth holding onto and writes them as question-and-answer cards. You do not start from a blank screen or copy definitions across by hand.

From there the deck plugs into a built-in spaced-repetition review. Each card has a place in a schedule. When a card is due, Polmi puts it in front of you. When you mark how well you recalled it, Polmi adjusts when you will see it next: sooner if you struggled, later if it was easy.

• A flashcard deck generated from each lecture transcript, no manual setup.
• Cards built from the terms and ideas Polmi surfaces, not random sentence fragments.
• A review queue that shows you only the cards due today.
• Intervals that stretch out as a card sticks, so you spend less time on what you already know.

Polmi's transcription is the source for all of it. If you want to see how a recording becomes the transcript and summary that feed your deck, read about lecture transcription.

Why spaced repetition works

Two ideas do most of the work here, and both have decades of research behind them.

Active recall

Pulling an answer out of your own memory is a stronger study act than rereading the same page. The effort of retrieving something is part of what makes it stick. A flashcard forces that retrieval every time you flip it: you see the question, you try to answer, then you check. Rereading notes feels productive and rarely is. Recalling them is the part that moves a fact into long-term memory.

Spacing

We forget on a curve. A fact reviewed once fades within days. A fact reviewed again right before it slips, then again after a longer gap, holds for weeks, then months. Spaced repetition times each review to land near that edge of forgetting, which is where a review does the most good. That is why a few minutes a day beats one long cram session: the gaps between reviews are doing the work.

We go deeper into the research, the forgetting curve, and how to space your own reviews in our guide to spaced repetition.

How it fits into studying with Polmi

The flow is short. Record a lecture in class or upload a file you already have. Polmi returns a full transcript, a summary with the key terms marked, and a flashcard deck. Open the deck, run the cards Polmi marks as due, and come back the next day for the next set.

1. Record or upload your lecture audio or video.
2. Polmi writes the transcript and summary and builds the deck.
3. Review the cards that are due, marking how well you recalled each one.
4. Come back when Polmi surfaces the next batch.

For the full picture of what happens between recording and review, see how Polmi works.

What we're honest about before launch

Polmi opens to students in summer 2026, so we are not going to quote retention stats or study-group results we do not have yet. What we can tell you is what the product does: generate flashcards from each lecture, schedule them with a built-in spaced-repetition review, and keep your transcripts and notes encrypted. Flashcards and review are part of the core experience across plans. The web version, where you can run reviews in a browser as well as the app, comes with paid plans. You can compare what each plan includes on the pricing page.

Common questions

Do I have to write the flashcards myself?

No. Polmi builds the deck from the lecture transcript automatically. You can review the cards as they are, and the spaced-repetition schedule starts working the first time you run a session.

How does Polmi decide when to show a card again?

After each card, you mark how well you recalled it. Polmi uses that to set the next interval: cards you find hard come back soon, cards you find easy come back later. The cards due on a given day are the only ones in your review queue.

Can I review flashcards on my laptop?

Yes, on paid plans. Polmi has a web version, so you can run reviews and read your notes in a browser as well as in the app. Free plans use the app.

Is spaced repetition actually better than rereading?

For long-term retention, the research says yes: recalling a fact and spacing the reviews beats rereading the same material. The spaced repetition explainer walks through why.