If you use Anki seriously, you already know the workflow: read an article, spot a fact worth remembering, switch windows, paste it into a note template, reformat it, repeat. The reading and the card-making happen in two different worlds, and the friction quietly kills half the cards you intended to make.
This post walks through a workflow that keeps everything in the browser tab: select text, generate flashcards, review them, and write them straight into your Anki decks. It uses AnkiMate, a Chrome and Edge extension my team built — but the setup (AnkiConnect + a capture habit) works with other tools too, so most of this post applies even if you use something else.
The 60-second setup
- Install the AnkiMate extension (also on Edge).
- In desktop Anki, install the AnkiConnect add-on (code
2055492159) and restart Anki. - That's it. The extension talks to your local Anki over AnkiConnect — there is no account, no cloud sync step, no middleman.
The workflow: select → generate → review → write
- Select any text on an article, lecture note, or documentation page (or use full page / PDF / YouTube transcript as input).
- Right-click → Generate flashcards. A side panel opens with draft cards.
- Edit or delete anything you don't like. Nothing is final here — every card is editable, removable, and draft-saved.
- Pick a deck and hit Write to Anki. Cards land in your collection tagged and deduplicated.
The last step is the one that saves the most time. Cards are written directly into the deck you choose, deduplicated by content hash — and if the source page changed, the card gets updated instead of duplicated. No more discovering three near-identical cards about the same fact a month later.
Templates tuned by subject, not one generic prompt
A generic "make flashcards from this text" prompt produces generic cards. AnkiMate ships nine templates, each tuned for a subject:
- Medicine (USMLE) — expects clinical detail, not trivia
- GRE vocabulary — word, definition, usage
- Language learning — front/back with context, plus a reversed-vocabulary variant
- Law — element-based structure
- Programming — concept and code-focused cards
- List breakdown — turns enumerations into atomic cards (the classic "one fact per card" rule, enforced for you)
- General — everything else
Eight templates are free. Pro adds Cloze deletions (fill-in-the-blank), which is the right format for definitions, dates, and anatomy.
Privacy: on-device AI by default, BYOK if you want more
This matters to us, so it's the design center: on-device AI handles generation by default, and your selected text never leaves the browser. If you want a stronger cloud model, you plug in your own API key — and then your text goes directly from the extension to that provider, not through our servers. We never see your selections, your cards, or your key. (We wrote up why this matters in more detail — most "AI readers" proxy every page you visit through their own backend.)
Pricing, honestly
- Free, every day, no card required: 3 generations per day (roughly 45–90 cards), all 8 non-Pro templates, all input types, unlimited writes to Anki. For most students this is genuinely enough.
- Pro · Lifetime $19.9 (launch price, $29.9 after): unlimited generations, batch generation of 20+ cards from long pages, and the Cloze template. One payment, no subscription — the price of two coffees for the tool you'll use every study session.
Honest limitations
- Desktop Anki (with AnkiConnect) needs to be running when you write cards — AnkiMobile/AnkiDroid alone won't receive them.
- Generation quality tracks source quality: a well-structured page produces great cards; a rambling forum thread needs more editing.
- It makes cards, not understanding. Spaced repetition still requires you to actually do the reviews.
Try it
Install from the Chrome Web Store or Edge Add-ons, or read more at glenkit.com/ankimate. If you have questions about the AnkiConnect setup or template design, leave a comment — I reply to all of them.
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