Your Anki Deck Covers Step 1, Not Your School's Block Exam

It's Sunday night. You've done 600 reviews of your pre-made deck, and the renal block exam is in 12 days. The deck is great for Step 1. But your nephrology lecturer spent four slides on one specific diuretic table, three of the practice questions came straight from it, and that table isn't in any deck you own.

So you're doing what everyone does: opening the 90-slide PPTX and turning it into cards by hand. That's an hour per lecture, and there are 22 lectures in this block.

This post is about that hour. It isn't about replacing Anki.

Anki is already doing the hard part right

If you use Anki, you already believe the two findings that matter most:

• Active recall beats rereading. Pulling an answer out of memory strengthens it far more than looking at it again.
• Spaced repetition beats cramming. Reviewing something just before you would forget it is the most efficient way to keep it.

Anki's scheduler is excellent, and the big community decks are the product of thousands of hours of careful work. Nothing here argues otherwise.

What Anki doesn't do is the step before the deck. Someone has to read your lecturer's slides, decide what is testable, and write questions about it. For a pre-made deck, someone else did that work. For your school's lectures, that someone is you, at 11pm.

What Tali does: the step before the card

Tali starts from the file your school already gave you.

1. Upload the lecture deck itself. PPTX, PDF, or photos of handouts all work (up to 30 MB per file). Tali splits it into sections and writes short notes, one testable point each. Then it writes multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions from those notes.

Roughly what you get back (illustrative; the real wording follows your slides):

Note · Loop diuretics (furosemide)
Act on the thick ascending limb. Major potassium loss → monitor K⁺; hypokalemia raises the risk of digoxin toxicity.

Question · A patient on furosemide and digoxin reports nausea and visual changes. Which lab value do you check first?
A. Sodium B. Potassium C. Calcium D. Glucose → B

That's one card's worth of work you didn't have to do.

2. Answer them right away. This is your first retrieval pass, and it shows what you can actually pull from memory, before you've spent any time writing cards. Points you get wrong go into the review queue: back tomorrow, at longer intervals each time you get them right, and back to tomorrow if you miss them again. If you've used Anki you already know this rhythm.

3. One correct answer isn't the finish line. This is the main difference from a flashcard. A card you've seen 40 times can be answered by recognising the card rather than knowing the concept. In Tali, a point is only marked verified after you answer it correctly twice, asked two different ways. The second question can be another question on the same point, a rewritten-scenario question from the readiness page ("Test me on a new scenario"), or a question the tutor asks you in chat or voice.

That produces one bucket Anki's statistics don't show you directly: "False confidence". These are points you got right once and then missed when the question was framed differently. On a block exam full of clinical vignettes, that bucket is where the points go.

4. Ask about the slide that makes no sense. The chat tutor answers from your uploaded lecture first and shows the line it's drawing from. If it goes beyond your material, for example into background physiology, it says so. After explaining, it asks you something back. A right answer there counts as evidence the same way a practice answer does, and a wrong one schedules that point for review.

Where each tool fits

	Anki + pre-made deck	Tali
Covers board-style content	Very well	Only what's in the file you upload
Covers your lecturer's emphasis	Only if you write the cards	Built from the lecture file itself
Scheduling	Mature, highly configurable	Simpler: wrong → tomorrow, right → longer gaps
Shows "recognised, but can't apply"	Not directly	Its own group ("False confidence") on the readiness page
Cost of a new lecture	~1 hour of card writing	One upload

A reasonable split: keep Anki for the board deck, and use Tali for the in-house block material that no deck covers. If you set the block exam date, the readiness page tells you how many unverified points you need to clear per day, which is the remaining count divided by days left, rounded up. In the last 14 days, daily review narrows to that course only.

One honest gap: Tali doesn't export to Anki. If you want those lecture points as cards in your own deck, you'll still have to write them. You'll just know which ones are worth writing.

What it costs

Pricing is in credits:

• 1 credit = one uploaded file (up to 20 sections, roughly 16,000 characters; longer files cost 1 more per extra 20 sections). That covers the notes, every question, unlimited answering, grading and reviews. Practice never costs extra.
• Chat is 1 credit per 12 messages. Voice tutoring is 1 credit per 2 minutes.
• 15 free credits when you sign up, no card needed. For most lecture decks that's around a dozen lectures.
• After that: $20 for 45 credits, $80 for 185 credits (credits don't expire), or $20/month for 60 credits.

What it won't do: guarantee a score, write questions about things your slides don't contain, or replace your school's own question bank.

Try it on one lecture

Pick the lecture from this block you'd least like to be examined on tomorrow. Upload it, answer the first round, and open the readiness page. The "False confidence" group is your list of cards worth writing, or points worth reviewing tonight.

How the review schedule works: https://tali.run/spaced-repetition