Hey everyone, Iâm Aaron Ge, an MS3 at Maryland. I built AnkiPilot after getting frustrated with how I was making cards during rotations.
Iâd miss a practice question, unsuspend the tagged AnKing cards, and move on. Sometimes those cards covered facts I already knew, and I still needed something that addressed why Iâd picked the wrong answer.
Hereâs an example from the demo: I picked primary polydipsia because the patient was drinking a lot of water. Iâd overlooked the concentrated urine. AnkiPilot uses that explanation of my mistake to make a card testing what I should expect the urine to look like if excess water intake were the cause.
Thatâs what I wanted for my own studying: a way to turn âhereâs what I misunderstoodâ into a card I could use next time.
I spent the past several months building and refining this almost every day around my rotations. Itâs a Chrome extension that works with your existing Anki deck. You provide source material and, optionally, explain why you missed something or what you were thinking while answering. It generates cards you can edit and add through AnkiConnect.
A lot of the work went into checking the cards. There are checks for broken cloze formatting, missing fields, and answers given away on the front. Optional planning and AI review modes identify testable facts, check for missing coverage, and rewrite cards with ambiguous questions, duplication, or medical qualifications that need attention. These checks can still miss errors; you review everything before adding it.
It also has:
- Automatic USMLE Step 2 tags by system, topic, discipline, and physician task, using a taxonomy built from the official outline. Yield tags are estimates based on blueprint weights.
- AnKing lookup by question ID, so you can check existing notes before adding another.
- Editable AnKing-style cloze and Basic cards, with explanations and comparisons in Extra, plus clinical application questions.
- Background generation and a review queue, so you can keep studying while cards generate.
- Text and table capture, pasted notes, screenshot transcription, card generation from images, and image-recognition cloze cards. Supported review modes also have optional medical-reference search.
My reviews used to reach 600-700 a day. Since changing how I add cards, Iâm around 300 with the same 0.85 desired retention setting. Thatâs my experience with the workflow, not a measured effect of the extension.
Demo and setup · Chrome extension · Setup guide
The extension is currently free, with no AnkiPilot account or subscription. You use your own provider API key, which can incur usage charges, or a downloaded local model through Ollama. Donations are optional and donât unlock features. Setup requires desktop Chrome, Anki, and AnkiConnect.
On UWorld and AMBOSS, it reads question IDs for matching notes, not their question text or explanations. For those, you write your own concept notes and use a downloaded local model.
I used AI coding assistance to build it. The demo question is original, and the narration is an AI version of my own voice. AnkiPilot isnât affiliated with Anki, AnKing, or the question banks.
If you try it, Iâd especially like to see examples of cards youâd keep or rewrite. That would help me keep improving the part Iâve spent the most time on.
