Show HN: Owl, a Spaced Repetition App | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Owl, a Spaced Repetition App

owl.cards

14 pointsfredoliveira15 comments

Owl is built a spaced repetition app. We built it for ourselves mostly because we were unhappy with Anki from a UX perspective, and are now releasing it to everybody else.

It is super tiny, but - we think - also pretty good. You can add your own decks manually, or generate them from a PDF (think academic papers, which is how I use that feature) or a prompt. There are no emails except study reminders (when there are cards to study). You can also use our "AI tutor" to review cards conversationally.

Looking forward to your feedback!

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Sorry, I’m not signing up for it because this is a pet peeve of mine: “Get started for free” with no link to pricing and no link to the business model. Will I be forced to pay after some limit that I’ll be informed of only after signing up? Does this website have a business model that can help it last for sometime? Is it free forever for all features because the creators just want to provide something to society?

It’s extremely disappointing and frustrating to see some new service that does not disclose how it’s expected to “keep the lights on” and how that would impact people who sign up.

I need the answers on the site, even if they’re provided here as a reply.

Totally fair — no business model exists today. Truly.

We built it and wanted to ship now and figure that out later. Obviously our goal is to keep the service up and we will. We're not strapped for cash. Ultimately we'll charge some kind of yearly fee for people who have a lot of decks, but have not come up with a monetary amount or what limits would exist. Our assumption was always to grandfather in early accounts (such as those created now) and learn from people's feedback.

Seeing it verbalized that this is frustrating is important, though, so thank you.

We'll add that as context on the site, and think through what a paid plan might look like.

This is really cool and I’m glad I stumbled upon it. I’ve played around with it for some time and am loving it, can definitely see myself being a long term and happy user. Have you thought about making this an app? Full blown launch on App Store might involve some toil and money but adding support for PWA is quite easy. Having it on my home screen increases my chances of opening it.

That's definitely in the cards (no pun intended... Or maybe?)

Signed up!

I've always been interested in spaced repetition but never had the patience to learn the "right" way to do it. This looks pretty helpful.

Do you think this AI x repetition concept works better for some types of learning than others?

Thank you! The AI review feature is useful because it can steer you in the right direction if you're having trouble remembering a card. The main thing about spaced repetition is that in order to memorize you have to do active recall, and the AI helps in that sense with the subtle nudges.

Owl wasn't built with AI in mind, though. It isn't necessarily an AI product. We use it where it helps (analyzing a paper and creating cards to study that paper is very cool, for example). I think there are even more angles to explore, but we can't claim to have tried them all :-)

I think you need to do a better job of explaining what benefit it brings, because AI is the only thing I see that distinguishes at from Anki.

I saw you said you didn't like the Anki UX, and I agree that it's a little unfriendly to new users. Your product looks like it's well pitched to new SRS users. But I don't see anything the compels, or even proposes, a need to switch from other solutions right now.

After two failed signup attempts, creating my first deck just crashed the whole app

> Application error: a server-side exception has occurred (see the server logs for more information). > Digest: 2072004716

Please please please add SSO for Google and Apple to your site. You’ll immediately see sign ups increase.

Impressions: Nice design, nice purpose, bad/opaque business model.

Almost had me prior to sign-up

Does it import Anki decks? I have built up quite a collection

Algorithm SM-2?

FSRS-5

> ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR

I am confronted in my daily work with a massive amount of good-to-know knowledge. To be precise, i am a field technician for copy machines. Every brand and model has its own details like which drum unit fits there and what to change to get $result. What helped me the most is just to simply touch the machine and build graphical impressions of the machine and the dark blue toner carton. I am not a friend of blindly accumulating knowledge without understanding. What uses you a fact sheet without knowing what those parameters do? I have tried such a website for learning all(why does that matter?) all countries in the world by finding them on a map. As a european, it was pretty annoying being asked the 50th time where italy is. I think its not necessary to really being able to find the last exotic island on a map, you will forget it after a year or so, if not even earlier. This sounds very against this app, but i am a instructor for my apprentices and i would never demand simply learning stupid facts, in the field, you will lack the ability having built up transfer knowledge. The rest is written in service manuals, nobody has on hands standing in front of the machine. You can research some stuff, but most of the time you have to combine facts that occur out of the blue in very changing circumstances. Nobody asks you every fucking parameter of such machines. So, dont rely alone on facts you know. I know academic learning is different what you experience later at your workplace, so i recommend to develop thinking and problem solving.

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