How do AI flashcards from YouTube work?
The app takes the video's transcript and asks Google's Gemini model to turn it into question-and-answer cards, then filters what comes back. Cards whose answer cannot be traced to something actually said in the transcript are dropped rather than shown, which is the guard against the model inventing plausible-sounding facts. What survives is a deck tied to the video it came from, so you can always check a card against the source. A deck holds up to 20 cards when the transcript came from AI transcription, or up to 15 when it came from the caption-based path, and you can generate up to three decks per video if the first attempt emphasised the wrong material. Flashcard generation is a Premium feature; reading the transcript it is built from is free on captioned videos.
How many flashcards can I generate from one video?
A single deck holds up to 20 cards, and you choose how many you want before it runs — a short explainer usually does not have 20 distinct facts worth memorising, so asking for fewer often gives a better deck than asking for the maximum. The ceiling depends on where the transcript came from: 20 cards when it was produced by AI transcription, 15 when it came from the caption-based path. You can generate up to three decks per video, which exists to stop runaway regeneration rather than to ration normal study; reopening a deck you already made never counts against that. Cards that the model could not tie back to the transcript are discarded before you see them, so a deck is sometimes slightly smaller than the number you asked for.
Are YouTube flashcards good for language learning?
They work well for it, because the vocabulary comes from material you chose to watch rather than from a generic word list — which means you are drilling words in the context you actually met them. The usual pattern is to watch something in the language you are learning, generate a deck from its transcript, and review that deck instead of hunting for the words manually. Because the transcript can also be translated into 134+ languages, you can read the original and check yourself against your own language when a card does not stick. Review supports going back over only the cards you got wrong, so repetition concentrates where you are weak rather than re-testing what you already know. Both flashcard generation and translation are Premium features. Because the deck is tied to its video, a card you cannot place can always be checked against the exact line it came from.
Can I review only the cards I got wrong?
Yes. After a round, the app offers a follow-up pass over just the cards you missed, so repetition lands on the material you have not learned yet instead of re-testing what you already know. That remedial round tracks the original cards, so a card you get right in it is not resurfaced endlessly, and a clean round does not suggest another one. This is the part that makes a generated deck genuinely useful rather than a one-off quiz: the first pass tells you what you did not absorb from the video, and the second pass is where the learning actually happens. Decks stay available after you make them, so you can come back days later and run the whole thing again to see what survived. Nothing is deleted between rounds, so a deck remains a permanent record of what that video was about.
Is the YouTube flashcards feature free?
Flashcard generation is a Premium feature, because building a deck means running a language model over the entire transcript and then filtering what it returns. What stays free underneath it is the material the deck is built from: extracting subtitles and transcripts from any public video that already has YouTube captions is unlimited and needs no account. So you can read and export the transcript of a lecture for free, and Premium is what turns that transcript into study cards. With Premium a deck holds up to 20 cards, you can generate up to three decks per video, and review supports a second pass over only the cards you got wrong. Premium is one in-app subscription handled by Apple or Google, covering both iOS and Android on the same store account.
