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Show HN: Anki/Duolingo-like app using educational YouTube videos

by kirill5pol on 1/26/24, 9:04 PM with 97 comments

Hi HN,

I watch A LOT of educational YouTube videos but wasn't forgetting a good chunk of the details because I was only really passively watching. So I made a tool that generates quiz questions/flashcards from YouTube videos, and uses spaced repetition like Anki or Duolingo to keep it in memory.

Let me know if you find it cool/useful (or terrible ) or if you want to know a bit about the details!

  • by yogurtboy on 1/26/24, 11:38 PM

    This is amazing! I tried a couple of videos and the questions seem pretty relevant and answerable (is there a better word for how a question is worded clearly and the provided answers seem clearly distinct and one of them is obviously correct), which is really hard to do by hand, much less by AI.

    I know you've addressed the video selection in the playlists, but I would highly suggest doing something to get it to differentiate "educational entertainment" videos (I notice a lot of Real Engineering and Economics Explained and CGP Grey videos) and actual education videos: primary-source explainers from teachers and subject-matter experts. The information density in the latter is way higher, and I think people overestimate the educational value of the former.

  • by snordgren on 1/26/24, 10:15 PM

    When I saw Anki/Duolingo in the bio I assumed it was for language learning, but this is a great idea!

    I too often watch these kinds of videos without really retaining a lot. This is a perfect complement to turn infotainment into time well spent, or at least, less wasted.

  • by sonovice on 1/27/24, 9:11 AM

    Great project! I had to laugh at the very first question I got, though: "Who is the sponsor of the video?"

  • by rollinDyno on 1/27/24, 3:01 AM

    I've always wanted to do this for Wikipedia, it could even be a Wikimedia add-on.

    However, I have recently transitioned towards becoming better at compiling information quickly rather than spending a chunk of my day memorizing facts that I am not quite sure will be useful.

  • by dotancohen on 1/27/24, 12:09 AM

    Amazing, thank you. It even works great for music videos, I never appreciated the poetic lyrical context of Pantera before. ))

    Small bug, the service requires a youtube.com URL and cannot handle an m.youtube.com URL, as happens when copying from a phone web browser or NewPipe. Perhaps you could support the mobile URL as well.

    Thanks, great work!

  • by pawelduda on 1/26/24, 11:24 PM

    I like the idea, but seeing how many new accounts added fake comments makes me a bit suspicious :)

  • by jacknews on 1/26/24, 10:14 PM

    Who chooses the videos? It seems ... opinionated.

    For example, under 'Physics', we have "The big lie about carbon capture', 'Why (toilet) flushing isn't for everyone', 'The scientific basis for miracles', etc.

  • by schmorptron on 1/27/24, 7:28 AM

    Oh my god, this is something I've wanted to make or see made for a while now! I'll definitely be using this, the design looks straight forward and good too!

    Any way to self-host to get around the 30 minute video limit?

  • by albert_e on 1/27/24, 5:19 AM

    This is a cool idea.

    I wanted to have a bookmarking site that allows me to add my own time-stamped notes to YouTube videos I watch for learning purposes.

    I was using OneNote without any such features.

  • by maroonblazer on 1/27/24, 1:40 PM

    I love this, great work!

    One note: After submitting a video and answering the questions, the "New Videos to Watch" section appears to be videos similar to the one I uploaded, but may have not been uploaded to PlatoEdu. My expectation was that these were videos others had already uploaded and for which questions had already been generated. So I was surprised when I clicked on one and it started uploading. Had I known it was going to be added I wouldn't have clicked on it, as I'd first want to watch it to verify the content is high quality.

    Again, great work. Bookmarked!

  • by mvkel on 1/28/24, 4:14 PM

    Comparing this to duolingo is selling yourself short.

    Duolingo creates dopamine hits under the facade of learning a language (which you never do).

    With this, it's fun, and you can actually learn something.

  • by yungeeker on 1/27/24, 12:50 PM

    This looks somehow like my app ClipMemo. The difference is that my app require you to create cards (called Memo in the app) by yourself. You select the start & end timestamp and you can review, repeat the clip. Besides YouTube it supports local video or other platform like Bilibili, China's counterpart of YouTube.

    I'm not sure wheather my idea works or your work does. I'm also curious about which workaround solve this problem better. You can find ClipMemo on App Store.

  • by sebnun on 1/27/24, 3:33 PM

    Neat. I built a web app to learn languages that used podcasts and YouTube transcriptions too. The problem with YouTube was that their API was very limiting, so I ended up having to use a proxy and some unofficial API to scrape the videos. The whole thing felt very sketchy so I ended up removing the whole YouTube functionality and just focused on podcasts (https://langturbo.com)

    I hope you have better luck.

  • by puzzydunlop on 1/27/24, 5:12 AM

    This is very cool! I'm trying to do something technically similar by using LLMs to summarize the meeting transcript from youtube (https://parths-newsletter-78dbcb.beehiiv.com/).

    Right now I'm doing this manually by copy/pasting into ChatGPT but I want to automate this aspect. I'm not very technical so any guidance you could provide would be helpful :)

  • by andruby on 1/27/24, 9:22 AM

    I love this!

    I wanted to build a “yt-campus” with a curated list of educational youtube channels.

    This does it better, thank you.

    One thing you could consider: allow your community to discuss the video’s. I’ve always wanted to have higher quality discussions about the Engineering videos I watch, and the YouTube comments really disappoint. Would you consider adding that? How about keeping your own personal notes per video?

  • by bobmaxup on 1/26/24, 11:34 PM

    Is NLU really this reliable yet? I tried making some scripts like this with LLMs, and it seemed to do very poorly. So, I abandoned the effort.

  • by hellcow on 1/27/24, 5:13 AM

    I like the idea. I’m learning European Portuguese, so I added a video but unfortunately got an error that there were no subtitles. The subtitles for the video in question are auto-generated, so maybe that’s the reason? Would be great if I could use this for foreign language studies.

  • by sebastianvoelkl on 1/27/24, 12:28 AM

    really cool. A while back I've build this database of 1000+ hand-selected educational YouTube videos, so I'm going to try out a few of them to put in this tool :) https://www.edutube.app/

  • by owenpalmer on 1/27/24, 3:00 AM

    This is fantastic! Is there a way to donate? This is the kind of software I want to see in the world!

  • by pavelboyko on 1/27/24, 10:23 AM

    Looks great! On a related note, I developed a similar free tool [1] designed for K12 teachers, primary focusing on curation and discovery of educational videos for classroom use.

    1. https://hulahoop.ai

  • by corderop on 1/29/24, 1:26 PM

    Impressive. This is a cool idea.

    Some improvements:

    - I tried with a Spanish video, and it told me it didn't have subtitles.

    - Would be supper cool to get them exported to Anki! Anyway, shouldn't be difficult to copy and paste it into Anki

  • by danielwyb on 1/26/24, 10:19 PM

    Nice! Would be great to use on longer videos and focus on specific topics of the video.

  • by willmeyers on 1/26/24, 9:50 PM

    The 30 minute limit is unfortunate, but otherwise it looks good. Thanks for sharing!

  • by yterdy on 1/27/24, 1:15 AM

    If this works as I expect it to, it'll be something I've been hoping to see for a long time. Thank your for sharing it with us!

  • by aorona on 1/29/24, 5:21 PM

    I like Anki but I feel like Duolingo has far too slow pacing to be practical

  • by kristianp on 1/27/24, 9:43 PM

    Seems a great application of AI as part of a structured app, instead of just a chatbot.

  • by wahnfrieden on 1/27/24, 1:48 AM

    How do you deal with YouTube Terms of Service for extracting transcripts?

  • by totetsu on 1/26/24, 11:10 PM

    I want to make flash card form everything I look up this way.

  • by realty_geek on 1/27/24, 8:54 PM

    I believe readlang has similar functionality.

  • by husarcik on 1/26/24, 10:56 PM

    What algorithm do you use for spaced repetition?

  • by vivzkestrel on 1/27/24, 3:56 AM

    so how does this worK? you take the video and extract captions from it? and feed it to GPT? i am sorry, can you clarify?

  • by qntmfred on 1/27/24, 10:32 AM

    timestamps on the transcript should be clickable to seek to that time in the video

  • by sidwrestler on 1/26/24, 10:33 PM

    I love this new Plato app, it’s useful and I educational. The interface is also very clean

  • by ellensatter on 1/29/24, 4:22 PM

    how do we access it?

  • by sstanfie on 1/26/24, 9:10 PM

    this looks great!

  • by clairegu123 on 1/26/24, 9:48 PM

    Nice

  • by vanijzen1 on 1/26/24, 9:25 PM

    Very cool!

  • by Davana on 1/26/24, 11:06 PM

    You just saved millions of students life's, A great tool that just solved a problem that existed but no one ever noticed