AI flashcards that land in your decks

At a glance

Make cards in Lucida

Choose Make cards, add what you want to learn from, and Lucida writes the cards with its own AI. You pick the deck (new or one you have), how many cards (Auto, 10, 20 or 50), the kinds (basic or fill in the blank, and audio cards once a language is set) and the language. Lucida first shows the new cards. You edit, remove or keep each one, or keep them all, and then they are saved in the deck.

You can add:

• A file. A PDF, a PowerPoint (.pptx), a Word file (.docx), a text file, or a lecture’s captions (.srt or .vtt).
• Pictures. A photo of notes, slides, a whiteboard or a book page. On the web, the file picker offers the camera on phones.
• A recording. An audio file (a long one is cut into parts of ten minutes or less on your device, up to your plan’s time), or a lecture recorded in the app with the microphone, with a timer, pause and stop.
• A YouTube link. Lucida watches a public video, or you can paste the video’s transcript instead.
• Pasted text. Paste your notes or any other text.
• A topic. Type it in words, like “the Krebs cycle”.

What happens to what you add

Text is pulled out of PDFs, slides, Word files and caption files on Lucida’s server, without an AI. Then an AI service writes the cards from that text, your pictures, scanned pages, audio, or the topic. A YouTube link goes to Google’s Gemini so it can watch the video.

Lucida asks for services that say they don’t keep it or train on it. Uploaded files are deleted after the make unless you keep them as the deck’s Source.

Sources and the Guide

Every deck keeps its Sources: what its cards were made from, whether a file, a recording, a video, pasted text or a topic. Each card remembers its page or time and can open the source there. Deleting a source removes its file, and the cards stay. Stored Sources have room for 500 files and 500 MB on Free, and 5,000 files and 5 GB on Pro.

Sources are private, even on a shared deck. A public deck’s page may only say “Made from 3 sources”.

When Lucida makes cards it also drafts starter notes for the deck from the same material: a title, a short overview, and the main ideas as headings in order, each with the page or time it came from. You see them next to the cards and can turn them off. A deck with no Guide gets them as its Guide. A deck that has one keeps it, and the notes become a new page named after the source.

For learning a language, choose the language and turn on Audio: Lucida writes words and short phrases that your device’s voice reads aloud, and the back says what they mean.

A deck can also have a Guide: a page written in Markdown (headings, lists, task lists, links, tables, code, quotes and pictures), shown under the deck’s header like a README. A Guide can have extra pages and a short history of versions, and “Make cards from this guide” turns it into cards. On a shared deck, the Guide shows on its public page.

How it works, step by step

To make cards with your own AI app, you connect it once and then ask it for cards. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is an open standard for connecting AI apps to outside tools and data. Lucida’s link is an MCP server that lets your AI read and write your flashcards once you sign in to Lucida from it. Lucida shows step-by-step setup for Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor. Gemini and Grok can add the same link, but Lucida has no steps for them, and menu names change, so follow each app’s own help page (linked under Sources).

• 1. Copy the link. It is the same for everyone, with no secret in it: app.lucida.cards/mcp. Connect AI in Lucida has it too, with a Copy button.
• 2. Add the link to your AI app and sign in. Use the steps in the table above: your AI app opens Lucida’s sign-in, and you press Allow. You only do this once.
• 3. Ask for cards. For example: “Make 20 flashcards from these lecture notes, one idea per card.” Attach your notes or slides. Your AI reads them and sends Lucida the cards.
• 4. Study. The cards are in your decks, each one already on the review schedule. If you turned on Let me check AI cards first, they wait under Cards to check until you keep or toss them.

Signing in, and your private link

Lucida’s link opens nothing on its own: your AI app gets in only after you sign in and press Allow. Every app you allow is listed on the Connect AI page, and Disconnect ends it at once. An app that can’t sign in, like Cursor, can use your private link instead: Connect AI copies it without showing it. Anyone who has that link can reach your cards, so don’t share it or post it. If it leaks, open Connect AI and choose Make a new link. The old link stops working right away.

What your AI can do with your cards

• Look at your decks, your cards and what’s due, so it can quiz you.
• Add cards of four kinds: question and answer, fill in the blank, picture, and sound. It can add up to 500 in one request.
• Fix or change cards, put decks in folders, and set a deck’s background.
• Write Learn mode questions for your cards: multiple choice with believable wrong answers, and true-or-false statements, each with a short why. It can also leave a short explanation of a card’s answer.
• Search the decks other people share on Lucida and add one to your library, or suggest fixes to a deck you study.
• On Pro, read your weak spots and your recent review history, so it can quiz you on what you forget.

What your AI can’t do

• Draw the hidden boxes for picture cards. You add those in the editor (see image occlusion).
• Delete cards, unless you switch that on.
• Change anything on other people’s decks. It can only suggest changes.
• Read PDFs or slides through Lucida’s link. Your AI app reads them and sends Lucida the cards. To have Lucida make cards from a file, use Make cards in Lucida.

You stay in charge

On the Connect AI page you choose what your AI may do. Tools you switch off aren’t even offered to the AI.

• Read cards and what’s due (on by default)
• Write text and fill-in-the-blank cards (on)
• Write image and audio cards (on)
• Edit cards (on)
• Let me check AI cards first (off): new cards and changes wait until you keep them
• Delete cards (off)

Getting good cards from an AI

An AI is quick at drafting cards and not always good at it. In a 2026 test by Ozzie Kirkby and Andy Matuschak, using cards written from a reader’s highlights, even the best model they tried, GPT-5.2, made cards the authors rated unusable (off target, or too vague to work months later) 36% of the time. That was a different job from studying for a course, but the lesson holds: read what it makes. Lucida shows the cards it makes before they are saved, and with your own AI you can turn on Let me check AI cards first for anything that matters, like an exam.

Some prompt habits help. They come from Piotr Wozniak’s twenty rules of formulating knowledge, which Anki’s manual recommends too:

• One idea per card. Wozniak’s minimum information principle: make each card as simple as it can be.
• Blanks for facts inside sentences. Ask for fill-in-the-blank cards. Wozniak calls cloze deletion easy and effective.
• Avoid lists. Wozniak warns that sets and enumerations are hard to remember, so ask for one blank or one card per item.
• Give it your source. Share your notes or slides and tell it to stick to them, so it doesn’t add facts your course never covered.
• Ask for a short why in each card’s note, so a wrong answer teaches you something.

A prompt to start with

Try something like: “Here are my lecture notes. Make flashcards for my Cell Biology deck, tagged Exam 1. One idea per card. Use fill-in-the-blank for facts inside sentences, and add a one-line why in the note. Then write Learn mode questions for the cards that test understanding.”

Quizzes and explanations

Learn mode uses the questions your AI wrote when a card has them (about four times in five), and otherwise asks from the card’s own words and your other answers. Questions can ask about cause and effect instead of repeating the card.

When you tap Explain on a card, you see a two-to-four-sentence explanation: your AI’s, if it wrote one, or one from Lucida’s own AI (3 a day on Free, up to 200 a day on Pro). Each explanation is saved on the card, so seeing it again costs nothing. Explain is one of three places Lucida’s own AI is used. The others are making cards and starting a live game from a topic. Everything else your AI does for you happens in your own AI app, through Lucida’s link.

Limits and costs

• Making cards in Lucida, Free: 3 makes a day. One make takes up to 30 pages (a slide or a scanned page counts as a page), 15 minutes of recording or video, or 10 pictures, in files of up to 20 MB.
• Making cards in Lucida, Pro: 30 makes a day, up to 300 pages, 2 hours of recording or video, or 50 pictures, in files of up to 40 MB (25 MB for an audio file).
• One make gives at most 100 cards. A live game started from a topic counts as a make.
• Lucida can’t make cards from a web page address. Paste the page’s text, or save the page as a PDF and add that.
• Making cards with your own AI app is free, with no cap from Lucida on the number of cards on the free plan.
• Free includes up to 100 pictures and sounds. A picture with hidden parts counts once.
• Sound cards: on Pro, Lucida makes a natural-sounding voice for the sound cards your AI writes. On Free, the app reads them aloud with your device’s voice.
• Photo covers for decks are Pro, including ones your AI sets.
• A picture or sound can come from a web link. Lucida checks that it’s a real picture (PNG, JPEG, GIF or WebP) or sound (MP3, M4A, WAV, OGG or WebM) of up to 20 MB. iPhone HEIC photos aren’t accepted.
• Your AI app may have its own plan limits (see the table). For example, OpenAI lists developer mode for paid accounts.

What about the flashcards inside ChatGPT and Gemini?

ChatGPT and Gemini can now show flashcards in their own apps. OpenAI’s education newsletter (September 24, 2026) describes flip-card flashcards in ChatGPT that you can find in your library, and Google says study notebooks in Gemini can make interactive flashcards through NotebookLM. Lucida is where cards from any AI end up when you want them on an FSRS schedule, with Learn mode, sharing and live games, in a library you can export.

Keep reading

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Image occlusion flashcards

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