I use Anki. It's poorly-designed, but it's the best thing that I've used so far. I'd love to have an upgrade, but you have to convince me that your tool is actually materially better than Anki, and doesn't just "look beautiful". Using language like "modern" is a turn-off - it evokes feelings of Electron implementations, webtech, slow interfaces, and web design that wastes tons of visual space to be "minimal".
I see that you wrote a page that ostensibly compares it to Anki[1], but it doesn't tell me anything. You say that it's easy to use, but does it also support all of the features that Anki has? You say that "you won't have to worry about settings or addons", but settings are there for a reason (because people have different needs), and does your tool subsume all of the functionality of all of the Anki addons that people made? You say that "we release new features every week", but where's the list of features that have been recently added, and how does the feature-set compare with Anki?
I want a better tool than Anki, but you have to show me that it's actually better. Otherwise, you're not going to win over either the Anki users or the Quizlet users.
We're not at feature parity with Anki yet. Our focus isn't copying or competing with Anki. iI you just want everything in Anki but better and free, then Zorbi probably isn't the right fit for you (yet!)
For now, we're focusing on helping students learn more effectively through spaced-repetition. Hence our Chrome Extension + Notion Integration. Hope that gives you an idea on where we fit into the "Spaced-Repetition" space.
I’m very wary of putting my flashcards (about 25k in a bunch of decks stretching back nearly 20 years now) in something that either 1) I own fully (I’ve bought the software and it will work even if your company doesn’t); or 2) at least provide full-fidelity exports of not just the content but also the repetition history.
It looks like a very well-done app and I agree that Anki can be clunky but I don’t worry about it disappearing and taking years of work with it. I really do wish you luck but for me at least it’s a high bar to cross.
Your 25k cards interest me. I've long hoped to merge the concepts of knowledge base and retention. I love knowledge bases, but i want them to aid and augment my natural retention.
Can you speak about how you use the 25k cards? Do you feel you retain them all?
At first glance i suspect you're using your 25k cards the way i envision my ideal knowledge base setup. A store of information which exceeds my brains capacity, but which i can choose a slice at which i want to transfer to my brain. Ie choose a deck of cards and working on that to transfer (learn) the material again.
I'm not the original poster, but I have 19,324 cards in my computer science deck and 3,632 in my Spanish deck... so our numbers are similar.
I use my decks to keep topics in mind for years until I choose to forget them. But these cards are things I always have memorized -- they're not something that I restudy when I need them.
25k cards hardly exceed your brain's capacity! That's about the same amount of information as 12,000 words in a second language -- plenty of people are bilingual.
Do I retain them all? Errrr... not really. My retention of cards I haven't seen for a while is about 85%. Further, 1,354 of the cards are "suspended" -- that is, I've gotten them wrong enough times that Anki won't show them to me again unless I un-suspend them.
The most important questions to ask any one who's using a flashcard system are:
- What do you get out of it?
- What are your costs?
For me, I get years' worth of material I no longer need to look up and a good foundation in Spanish, even though I only travel every few years. But my costs are an hour a day, every day, trying to remember things that are just about to be forgotten.
A pointer I've learned when dealing with suspended cards that I want to keep is to take the time to come up with a mnemonic and add it to the answer, even if it's a little hokey. It took me a little practice to get the hang of coming up with creative mnemonics, but even the poor ones have proven effective for me.
I have ~10,000 cards in a Chinese deck (learning characters in college ~20 years ago is how I started with spaced repetition) that I built throughout the 2000s when I in college and then living in Shanghai. I don't add much to it anymore, but it keeps my reading pretty sharp, even though I don't use it much day-to-day anymore.
Another ~10,000 cards are work-related (computer science). I add to this frequently, mostly consuming research papers and turning them into cards.
The last ~5000 cards are an assortment of topics I've been interested in over the years.
I don't think that I use it the way you're describing--I more or less know all of the things that come up in my reviews each day, though I certainly miss things from time to time, and sometimes I go through and purge a bunch of cards related to topics that I don't have any interest in. It's much less than my total capacity (I know plenty of things that I haven't encoded as flashcards). More than anything it's a way to artificially engage pathways I'm not actively using, in the hope that when I need them they'll be there. It feels much less costly to maintain knowledge than to forget and relearn it, though there's always the danger that you are wasting cycles maintaining things you'll never need again.
I agree fully that export is a must for app like this. On the other note, your collection of flashcard sounds impressive, perhaps you could consider publishing those flashcards publicly on github or somewhere, and kill 2 birds with 1 stone: backup the flashcard and also share the knowledge?
I'm not the original poster, but I have more than 23k cards in Anki.
I would emphatically not want to publish my flashcards publicly. Many of them are internal to where I work, and simply aren't interesting outside my workspace.
(Does any one outside my company want to memorize the class names for the eight steps my company uses to do on-the-fly scoring of open opportunities? I didn't think so...)
+1 I would not publish mine, both because of a lot of work-related things, but also a lot of weird / inside-joke / funny but probably only to me references in them.
I also believe firmly that the act of creating flashcards is part of what encodes them in your brain. I've never had any luck with prepared decks.
Congrats! I hope more people gets into learning by space repetition.
I do not agree with the way you are marketing yourself (critisizing Anki) you should be good on your own terms. From you website.
« ZORBI IS THE TOOL THAT ANKI SHOULD HAVE BEEN
Anki was built in 2006 for lifelong learning, and it was good for a while.
But let's get real. Anki is a clunky tool that people tolerate. You have to worry about optimizing settings, downloading addons, and updates that might corrupt your data.
Zorbi is easy to use, you won't have to worry about settings or addons, and we release new features every week.»
Also, is not clear at what point you will be asking for money.
No monetization right now - we have some revenue streams that will let us keep the core app free.
Freemium might happen in the future for niche features (e.g. Improved TTS / GPT-3 Flashcard Generation).
No data exporting yet. We plan to add CSV/PDF exports in the next month.
Offline mode is not possible yet - it will be within a couple of months.
Public API + Extendability is 100% planned. If you're interested in developing anything custom then get in touch with us! Might be able to set something up for you.
This looks like a really nicely put together resource, congrats!
I would be likely to sign up if I knew there was an option to export to a more established free flashcard engine (e.g. Anki), or at least to csv, say, for no other reasons than peace of mind and flexibility. I see in your FAQ that that is on the cards (hah!) so I will keep my eye on it and I think you will definitely get more buy-in when that is a working feature.
The feature checklist is only a part why people use a product.
I didn't try Zorbi yet but I tried Anki a few times and I simply hate its interface. Yes, it has all the features but it is far too clunky and bothersome to use for me. Zorbi in contrast looks like it has a easy, beautiful UI that I can actually use with joy.
No, it's been happening for years. If "too few" people have run a particular program, Windows decides it's not trustworthy. You can choose to run it anyway, or wait for Microsoft to make it "trusted" (for niche programs the latter doesn't always happen).
I found Anki to be easy to pick up for my simple use-case, and the interface isn't any worse than most other tools out there.
Yes, features aren't the only reason why people use a product, but some people (me, and many others here) do mainly use a product for its features. The lack of a comparison is somewhat of an oversight.
For that matter, there's no UI comparison either - no video showing a side-by-side diff between Zorbi and other tools (Anki, Mnemosyne, Quizlet, etc) - which, all in all, makes it a hard sell for most people who are already using an SRS, and I'm pretty sure that Quizlet has much more momentum and can acquire new-to-SRS users faster than Zorbi can.
How many months did you try Anki? It is not an instant solution. Needs you to decide how to use it best and try an approach. After a week i found i establish a way of both creating and reviewing cards nicely. I use it on Linux, mac for creating cards and review mostly on Iphone. (Do some card creating on iphone but not the bulk)
I'm afraid I feel this is kind of missing the point. I assert that you will spend the time coming up with how to remember a thing; the question is whether you choose to do that at card construction time (easiest, because you've got all the context available to you of the thing you're trying to remember), or ad-hoc during review time.
Creating a card is not just writing down some text (or, worse, copy-and-pasting it so that you remove all your agency entirely); rather, it's focusing a spotlight on a specific small aspect of your enormous mental model, determining how you can remember that particular aspect, and then writing down a card that will trigger you to illuminate that same spotlight in the future. Reviewing a card is not just dredging some detail from your memory; rather, it's remembering the reason you remember that card, and then re-activating the spotlight.
Writing and reviewing flashcards is a much more active process than many people think, and I am very wary of anything that purports to remove some of that activity, because the activity is what helps you remember!
You're completely right. Having an understanding of the topic is important. In fact it's stressed on our "Making flashcards" guide: https://zorbi.cards/making-good-flashcards
It's mostly the convenience of always having the ability to create a spaced-repetition flashcard there in your browser.
Our primary use cases are studying for exams and language learning. Hopefully that sheds some more light on how the Chrome extension / Notion integration are used.
I guess it depends on how you use the system. I know you learn more if you make your own flashcards carefully, but sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good. I am using Anki to learn Chinese vocabulary with a huge preconstructed deck that I downloaded, I've been doing this slow but steady for over two years, and it's working wonderfully, at least IMHO.
Of course it's hard to know whether other alternatives could have worked even better, but this way I devote 30 minutes a day which can be on the bus, in bed, etc. and make progress. If I had to spend the time and involvement of making the cards myself (which requires not only more time, but in practice a more dedicated setting with a PC and keyboard, etc., as I'm not going to make flashcards with my phone on the bus even if it's technically possible) I would probably have quit a long time ago.
So work on making the creation of flashcards easier seems like something that could be of interest at least to some people.
This! Writing your flashcard makes you think the subject through, and sometimes you need to try a few times until you get a good flashcard. This is the learning experience, the rest is just preventing you from forgetting it.
The app experience is very smooth. I managed to make a flashcard and review it very quickly.
Do you have any support for cloze-deletion? I find that is the number one way to improve your output in a foreign language.
How are you going to stop people making hundreds and hundreds of cards and being unable to review them? I find that people often start of using SRS systems by putting in way too much information and then getting overwhelmed by reviews.
Final question: any plans for teacher/student models. Quizlet has a few nice features for this but there isn't any spaced repetition as far as I'm aware.
Yes. We have cloze deletions. Hit Ctrl + Shift + C for cloze deletions (or hit the "Eye" that says "Hide Text")
RE: the issue with reviews piling up.
- We have some modifications planned for the algorithm that will make this easier. See the Load Balancer addon in Anki + algorithms like Half-life Regression which are making this easier to deal with.
Also we could all do with a "let me take weekends off" feature :)
---
Yes - we're working on some features for teachers. If you're a teacher you should get in touch - keen to learn more about what you need.
This looks fine, but I legitimately have no interest in this if it isn't open-source. I know that sounds harsh, but I've gotten so tired of tools changing over time, slowly goading me into another subscription service that I desperately don't want.
I appreciate this tool being free at the moment (the world doesn't need another SAAS), but I've seen nothing on this page that really makes me want to use it. To me, I see a cloud-based Anki alternative with less control over your data/freedom.
Thanks for the feedback. Going open-source is something we'd consider but right now we're focused on building a tool that people love (which becomes difficult with a bunch of hobbyist developers contributing).
Also closed source isn't always bad. It's no secret that Duolingo has the world's best spaced-repetition algorithm - they will IPO for 2.4 billion soon.
In my experience (I have over 10k flashcards in Anki and SuperMemo) it takes a lot of time to create the cards (vs. repeating/learning them). But the main reason is because I have to take time to think about and understand the content first, reformulate it in my own words (otherwise it won't stick well!), and cut it into bite-sized cards. What helped me most were articles "teaching" how to do this, or generally the experiences of others [1] [2].
From scanning your product's landing page, it seems you focus a lot on the time-savings during card creation, by relying on copy-and-paste. I'm not sure this is the best way to learn more complex topics, but may work fine for very clear things that are already bite-sized in the source material (e.g. chemical formulas, or language vocabulary). Are you focusing on these use cases?
A lot of it isn't actually copy paste, but just quality-of-life tricks to speed up card creation while going through lecture notes / reading an article.
e.g. we have tooltips+hotkeys that let you append the highlighted text to the front/back.
One-click card creation for language vocab is on our roadmap and will be a focus-area soon. We're focusing on students / teachers right now.
As you hinted at I think there are still cases where mass automated card creation is useful. I’ve had success doing this for Chinese characters - I ordered them by frequency and then made them into cards using the AnkiConnect API addon, then I feed in 5-10 new cards per day. There isn’t much creativity required in creating the cards since all the characters have definitions in Unihan.
I tried it briefly: I really liked it at first but there is one critical flaw; you need to be able to do the flash cards in reverse. Knowing the definition of something by seeing the name is useful, but it's only half of the value of flashcards. I'll come back to it if they add the ability to study the cards seeing the definition side to quiz you on what the name of the concept is.
Looks decent. I'd like to see more tooling around creating flashcards that are easy to answer over a long period of time. It's deceptively difficult to make good flashcards because you often can't tell if you've created a bad flashcard until you've repeated it a few times. Often, that means months/years later.
For example, rule four here https://zorbi.cards/making-good-flashcards/ tells you not to make difficult to answer flashcards. And then the rest of the examples all over the site are all difficult to answer cards. Maybe not now, but in a year or two from now.
If I can 1. Import from Anki and 2. Have a simple bulk actions API for cards then I'd use this. Anki's db model is so absurdly over designed it's a pain to work with. Cards should be rows in a single unified table per card type.
People think I’m crazy but my office is lined with a wall of 4x6” notecard filing cabinets. All cards linked with individual branched id’s (I’d dare call it that term starting with a Z but the explanation of such term has been warped and morphed into something it is not. Which is why I dare not mention it. All but one first-page google result explains it wrong).
While I applaud the creator of this app, I’ve found the analog way most effective and fulfilling. I find it develops my brain instead of developing something or someone else.
I opt for the hard way. The slow way. Paper and pen and, a lot of whiteout rollers.
I completely agree about using pen and paper for learning and organizing my life. I have a weekly wall planner made of sticky notes and it’s so much more fulfilling than poking around a calendar app to see my week outlined in a two square foot section of my office wall. But for those of us who are curious about your process, could you please tell us what the Z word is and link to your recommended resource?
Im not the GP, but I'd guess Z stands for Zettelkasten, at least that's the only famous system I'm aware of in that space.
You can read more about it ihere: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten
How have you found your initial few thousand users?
I've built my own sort of Anki/SRS app but specifically for language learning. Extra features like dictionary lookups and generated audio for each card. Not as super customizable as Anki, but many language learners arrive at similar configurations (e.g., Refold). I've seen more and more language learning apps are starting to have SRS as a foundation
I think pitching it as « for exams » can be limiting. Though I understand you want to appeal to a niche at this early stage. Maybe have a landing page with the « ace your exams » hero that students might land on after a google search, and a home page that has a broader pitch?
I like that with the emerge of Summon The JSON flashcards become more popular. It is a great way to ease the stress of learning and have some fun with it
I had created this website few months back to teach html, css, js to a newbie. Though this doesn't have spaced repetitions and saving stuff. But if you want to print your flash cards, then you can use this.
I built a tool for myself earlier this year that's very similar to this, and I wrote a bit about it here [1].
For the most part, I found that flashcards only help when they are crafted with care, and it's a skill that needs to be learnt [2]. But what I found particularly useful about my hacked-up setup is that every card is contextualized: if I need a refresher for the content of a card, I can revisit the location (website/pdf) for it.
I see that you wrote a page that ostensibly compares it to Anki[1], but it doesn't tell me anything. You say that it's easy to use, but does it also support all of the features that Anki has? You say that "you won't have to worry about settings or addons", but settings are there for a reason (because people have different needs), and does your tool subsume all of the functionality of all of the Anki addons that people made? You say that "we release new features every week", but where's the list of features that have been recently added, and how does the feature-set compare with Anki?
I want a better tool than Anki, but you have to show me that it's actually better. Otherwise, you're not going to win over either the Anki users or the Quizlet users.
[1] https://zorbi.cards/anki-alternative/