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by emerongi 3974 days ago
So this is just Anki[1] under an umbrella? E.g. flash cards are provided by someone higher up who can also look at the data?

[1] http://ankisrs.net/

2 comments

Hey Emerongi, CEO here and great question.

SRS systems are a good start, however they typically only utilize flashcards and treat all information the same. Where we are starting is looking at the type of knowledge that's trying to be retained and building a solution for each one.

Without giving to much away, a SRS flashcard is quite good at helping you remember a vocabulary word, or a single fact. These systems break down quickly if you have a multistep process (like closing a sale) or a tree of conditional steps. We have solutions for each of these and we're learning a lot of interesting things from our early customers.

The entire system is built around creating information that is highly memorable, so from first view to latest review we're optimizing the learning path.

It seems, then, that you're a flashcard consultancy that works with customers to optimize learning using SRS + something like http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm. Perhaps with more secret sauce.

Are there studies you use to inform your secret sauce? Are they recent?

I ask as someone who's been building a personal knowledge base of sorts of which one key component is Anki / SRS.

This should have been in the article. From the title, I was expecting something completely else; reading the article I thought "nothing new" and eventually I was left with "there's some dude doing something".

As a daily Anki user, this seems interesting though.

I was a daily one for years, then completely moved on once I had Hickory (we use it for ourselves internally) and trained to get into YC with it.

Happy to talk more about this and talk go over what we're thinking. brian@hickorytraining.com

They're both tools that use spaced repetition [1].

The OP made it sound like Hickory is automatically generating cards based on what a user reads. It also sounds like Hickory is doing more analytics. Of course, Anki is open-source, so it could be augmented to do these.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

The analytics are definitely useful. I re-read it and it does seem like Hickory automatically divides any text into flash-cards. Not sure how effective that is in reality though.
Stay tuned. :-)