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I’ve been working on https://phrasing.app for a while now, including many iterations of the SRS. It’s been my experience that most of these sorts of improvements are really imperceptible. While I use FSRS as a base, and I’m very happy with the results it provides, it’s really only a few percentage points off of the SM-2 algorithm from the 90s. It’s slightly less stressful, definitely more accurate, but I think only astute users would even notice the difference. I’ve incorporated many different things into the SRS, from vector embeddings to graph based association to lemma clustering to morpheme linking, and was surprised how much of these I took out. Most of the unlocks with the SRS have been more in application space. Doing reviews with Anki feels like a chore, and I’m always counting down the reviews left to do. Reviews with Phrasing however are much more addictive, and I routinely spent an extra 30+ minutes in that “ok just one more card” loop. We will never be able to know with 100% certainty how well you know a card, but FSRS gets us darn close. I think the interesting stuff is less about improving that metric, and more about what can you do with that information. Thanks to the whole FSRS team btw (I assume y’all will be reading this hn post) <3 And if anyone is curious I wrote up a bit about my SRS here: https://phrasing.app/blog/humane-srs |
There's a lot of UX work to do for SRS. Do you have a sense of how well the ideas behind Humane SRS translate outside of language learning? I imagine the main challenge would be identifying a steady influx of new cards.
I agree that gains in scheduling accuracy are fairly imperceptible for most students. That's why, over the past few years building https://rember.com, we've focused on UX rather than memory models. People who review hundreds of card a day definitely feel the difference, doing 50 fewer reviews per day is liberating. And now that LLMs can generate decent-quality flashcards, people will build larger and larger collections, so scheduler improvements might suddenly become much more important.
Ultimately, though, the biggest advantages is freeing the SRS designer. I'm sure you've grappled with questions like "is the right unit the card, the note, the deck or something else entirely?" or "what happens to the review history if the student edits a card?". You have to consider how review UX, creation/editing flows, and card organization interact. Decoupling the scheduler from these concerns would help a ton.