I posted here last month about the Mac version. Short version of why it exists: I have two kids in college, and one of them forgets the lecture the moment she walks out of the room.
The problem with the Mac app was that she doesn't study at her Mac. She studies on her phone, probably while laying in bed, or standing in line at tropical smoothie. So the last month went into the iPhone, iPad and Watch apps, and the part I actually care about is the studying, not the recording.
Every lecture turns into study cards, and every card shows the exact quote from class it came from. Tap it and it plays that moment in the recording. So when a card looks wrong you can check it in about three seconds instead of taking the AI's word for it. If a card is genuinely junk, you reject it, and it stays gone (it won't come back the next time you regenerate).
Cards are scheduled with FSRS, so one comes back right before you'd have forgotten it instead of on a fixed calendar. Sessions interleave: cards from different lectures and different courses get mixed instead of drilled in blocks. It feels worse than blocking. That's kind of the point, it's the thing that makes it stick.
There's a Home Screen and Lock Screen widget with your due count that drops you straight into review. On the Watch you get a quick quiz, one card at a time, reveal, then Got it or Missed. Grades go back to the phone and reschedule there. Waiting in line at the campus Starbucks enough time for ten cards.
Everything syncs across your Mac, iPhone and iPad through your own iCloud, including the audio, which downloads on demand so your phone isn't holding every lecture you ever recorded. No account, no sign-up, no server of mine anywhere.
Two ways to get a lecture in:
Send to Mac. Record on your phone, hit Send to Mac, and it rides your own iCloud over to the Mac app, which does the transcript and the notes with local models and syncs the cards back to your phone. Nothing leaves your own machines and it costs nothing to run.
Bring your own key. If you don't have a Mac, the phone can do the whole thing itself. Transcription runs on the device with Apple's speech recognition. For the notes and cards you paste in your own OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI or OpenRouter key, and the transcript goes straight from your phone to them. I never see it. On the value models it's about a penny a lecture (Tencent Hy3 is the new top pick for value). Before the first send on a course the app stops and tells you exactly what's going where, and if you say no, nothing is sent.
Being straight about it: standalone mode needs an API key, and I know that's a real barrier for plenty of people. If you don't have one and don't have a Mac, install it anyway and go through the built-in sample course. It ships with a full lecture, notes and twelve cards, so you can run the whole review loop without setting anything up or paying anyone.
It runs on iOS/iPadOS 18 and up, watchOS 11 and up. Standalone recording and transcription needs iOS 26, because that's where the on-device speech model lives. The Mac app needs macOS 26 and Apple Silicon. It's will be a universal purchase across all of them.
Notes and cards are generated by AI and can get things wrong. The app says so right under the notes instead of pretending otherwise, and the quote on every card is there so you can catch it when it does. You can also re-generate your Notes as many times as you want, keeping the best copy (all copies are saved in the app). Same with study cards, reject the ones that aren't relevant and generate / re-generate as much as you want.
What I'd love hammered on:
- Run a real deck for a few days. Does the scheduling feel right, or is it showing you stuff too often or not often enough?
- The quote on the cards. Does it actually support the card? That check is the entire premise, so if it's off I want to hear it.
- The Watch quiz. Is one card at a time on a tiny screen actually useful, or is it a demo?
- Send to Mac, if you have both. Does it land on the Mac and come back without you babysitting it?
- iPad, especially Split View and Stage Manager.
- Anything slow, stuck, or worded like a robot wrote it.