Turn a recorded lecture into flashcards

Most of what a lecture teaches you is gone by the end of the week, and the usual fix — typing notes into a flashcard app afterwards — is exactly the step nobody has time for. Transcription apps solve half of it: you end a lecture with a wall of text, and a wall of text does not test you.

Quat does the whole distance. You record; it transcribes, writes a note, and builds flashcards that quiz you on a spaced-repetition schedule. Here is the entire workflow.

The steps

1. Open Quat and go to the Capture tab, then choose Audio.
2. Record the lecture — or a seminar, a tutorial, or yourself talking through a topic out loud. Put the phone somewhere near the speaker and let it run.
3. Stop when it ends. Quat transcribes the recording and pulls out what is worth remembering into a note. Capture needs a connection; everything after it works offline.
4. Read the note. It is yours to edit — fix a term the transcription misheard, cut what you do not need.
5. Quat turns the note into flashcards. Each one carries a stamp — MIC · JUL 26 · CARDIO LECTU — so weeks later you can trace any card back to the recording it came from.
6. Review. The schedule brings each card back on the day you are about to forget it, and when the day's cards are done, the session ends and says so.

Worth knowing before you record

• Ask the lecturer first. Most are fine with recording for personal study, and asking costs you one sentence.
• The phone does not need to be close to you — it needs to be close enough to the speaker to hear them clearly. Nearer the front beats the back row.
• Recording yourself works as well as recording a lecture. Talking through a topic from memory and letting Quat card the result is a fast way to find out what you actually know.

What it costs

Reviewing, exams and games are free without limit. A subscription raises the monthly ceilings on the parts that call a model — capture, the tutor, and card generation. There is no account and no sign-up; your notes and cards stay on the device.

The other two captures

A lecture is one of three ways in. You can also photograph a textbook page or paste a link — the same note-then-cards pipeline, with a different stamp.