Generating flashcards from a PDF
How GuruOwl turns documents into decks — Standard vs Expert tier, image occlusion, accuracy checks, credit costs, and how to get better cards.
Upload a PDF in Materials and GuruOwl generates a deck from it. This page explains what happens, what it costs, and how to get the best cards.
Standard vs Expert
| Standard | Expert | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | 1 credit / page | 3 credits / page |
| How it works | Single pass over the text | Plan → generate → critique → rewrite, multiple passes |
| Image occlusion | — | Detects labeled diagrams and generates image-occlusion cards |
| Best for | Everyday notes and slides | Dense, high-stakes material: medicine, law, engineering |
AI-generated cards can omit or misread source material. Review each card against the PDF, check important facts, and edit before studying or exporting. Expert adds AI-assisted checks; it does not guarantee accuracy.
Expert background jobs support text PDFs within the upload and page limits shown before generation; check the estimate and job status.
What generation costs — and what it doesn't
- PDF generation: Standard 1 credit/page; Expert 3 credits/page for the upfront estimate. Check the estimate before confirming.
- AI coaching and other AI actions can also consume credits; check the relevant screen.
- Ordinary web card review, editing and APKG export do not consume generation credits. This is not a promise that every iOS feature or cloud-sync scope is free.
Web signup includes 50 credits. Estimated generation: 1 credit/page for Standard or 3 for Expert; check the estimate before confirming. No card required.
Standard streams interactively; keep the page open. Expert runs as a background job and can continue after navigation. Check job status and the credit ledger before restarting; do not assume every interrupted attempt is complete or refunded.
Image occlusion (Expert)
If your document has labeled diagrams — anatomy figures, circuit schematics, annotated charts — Expert scans for them and turns the labels into image-occlusion cards: the diagram with a label hidden, and you recall what's under the mask. Documents without labeled diagrams simply produce zero occlusion cards; the scan costs nothing extra.
Getting better cards
- Web text-card generation requires a selectable text layer. For image-only scans, run OCR in a scanner or PDF editor and upload the searchable PDF. Creating an account does not unlock full-document OCR.
- One chapter per deck beats one 400-page deck for organization — unless you want Expert's whole-book mode to structure it for you.
- Edit after generating. Delete trivia, tighten wording. Ten seconds per card during review of the draft saves minutes of wasted reviews later.
- Cards are cloze-first for dense material: the sentence keeps its context and only the retrievable fact is hidden.
After the deck exists
- Study it from Today — it joins your daily plan.
- File it under a goal so the countdown and daily plan account for it.
- Export it to .apkg any time — your decks are never locked in.