AI-Powered Anki Card Generator
Lectern transforms PDF lecture slides into high-quality Anki flashcards instantly. It parses your slides, composes a multimodal prompt for Google's Gemini, and creates notes in your running Anki instance via AnkiConnect.
Lectern is designed for students and professionals who need to rapidly convert structured documents into spaced-repetition material. By leveraging multimodal AI, it goes beyond simple text extraction to understand visual context, ensuring high-quality, concept-driven flashcard generation. The application features a clean, native desktop experience with real-time progress tracking and a dedicated review interface.
Stream cards directly into the application as they are generated, with dynamic pacing and concept mapping to ensure comprehensive coverage.
Review generated cards, monitor page and concept coverage, and selectively sync them to your Anki database.
A clean, minimal interface for editing cards before finalizing them in your collection.
Download Lectern (macOS / Windows / Linux)
- Open the downloaded application. (On macOS, right-click and select "Open" on first launch).
- Install the AnkiConnect add-on in Anki.
- Open Settings and enter your Gemini API Key.
- Drop a PDF into Lectern and start generating.
Windows notes:
- You do not need Python installed on your PC to run Lectern.
- Lectern prefers system WebView2 Runtime; some builds may include a bundled fallback runtime.
- If startup fails, check
%APPDATA%/Lectern/logs/windows-startup.logfor diagnostics.
For full user documentation, troubleshooting, and guides, visit the Lectern Landing Page.
Welcome to the codebase. We maintain a comprehensive, centralized Wiki in the docs/ folder.
- System Architecture: The 10,000-foot view (diagrams, data flow).
- Development Guide: Local setup, running the app, testing, and CI/CD.
- Design System: The UI/UX philosophy and Tailwind conventions.
- AI Pipeline: Gemini integration, the 3-phase loop, and pacing strategy.
- Frontend Architecture: React, Zustand state management, and V2 NDJSON event streaming.
- Backend Architecture: FastAPI routing, PyWebView wrapper, and AnkiConnect.