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Show HN: Anki/Duolingo-like app using educational YouTube videos (platoedu.org)
289 points by kirill5pol 3 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 97 comments
Hi HN,

I watch A LOT of educational YouTube videos but wasn't forgetting a good chunk of the details because I was only really passively watching. So I made a tool that generates quiz questions/flashcards from YouTube videos, and uses spaced repetition like Anki or Duolingo to keep it in memory.

Let me know if you find it cool/useful (or terrible ) or if you want to know a bit about the details!




This is amazing! I tried a couple of videos and the questions seem pretty relevant and answerable (is there a better word for how a question is worded clearly and the provided answers seem clearly distinct and one of them is obviously correct), which is really hard to do by hand, much less by AI.

I know you've addressed the video selection in the playlists, but I would highly suggest doing something to get it to differentiate "educational entertainment" videos (I notice a lot of Real Engineering and Economics Explained and CGP Grey videos) and actual education videos: primary-source explainers from teachers and subject-matter experts. The information density in the latter is way higher, and I think people overestimate the educational value of the former.


> and I think people overestimate the educational value of the former.

I disagree. Some people might overestimate how in-depth the information is, but the educational value of these videos lies in giving someone a basic understanding of something they otherwise wouldn't have learnt about at all. The lower information density helps making the video easier to understand and thus easier to consume, compared to something like a Havard class.

If you want to learn something in-depth, an actual class, a book, etc. will of course always be better, but if that's neither required nor wanted, the infotainment is just fine.


Yeah, I feel it's not ideal, but at least it's better than doom scrolling, and especially if it's a field that you're not familiar with having some simple explanations is still useful as a starting point


One point is if the end-user understand it is just infotainment and not a concrete guide.For example,People became "experts" on covid thorugh some videos that spread misinformation and became hardcore fanatics.This is just one example of many.


Thank you!!

Yes, this is actually something I've been thinking about quite a bit, I actually built out the playlist feature just this morning because it's easier to "show" how Plato works, but I basically just wrote some scripts to get some good enough videos for the demo

If you have any good channel suggestions I'd love to add them :))

One of the things I have on the backburner for now is building a BERT classifier to decide whether the video is Educational, Edu-tainment, or not educational at all and have a more customizable video suggestion than YouTube has (I actually have 2 accounts on YouTube, just so I can watch some random video on 1 without it polluting my education/learning heavy one)

One thing though, is I actually think both have their merit, while I agree the actual educational content is pretty different, the educational entertainment is a nice alternative to TikTok or IG reels when you just want to mindlessly scroll, I think there still often some useful content there, especially if you don't have any background in the area


> classifier to decide whether the video is Educational, Edu-tainment, or not educational at all

I'm a bit surprised to only see like 3 questions for a 14 minute video of quantum mechanics. For educational videos with very dense information, is there a way to raise the questions per video rate?

Looking forward to see MIT OpenCourseware videos supported. Right now they are too long :D


Working on that soon! That's actually also one of the reasons I'm limiting to 30 min, 5 questions definitely isn't enough for 1 hour video but I have some fixes in the work for it!

Pm me (email in bio) and I can add some MIT OCW videos and turn on support for longer videos to your account


"educational entertainment" videos are way too many, way too popular and binge-able - much more recommended by YT's AI. Actual education are much harder to discover on YouTube.

I have been wanting to build a YT front-end that lets me control how many "new" videos are recommended. New videos are the time-sinks.

Instead this new FE should make me re-watch so I absorb and retain better - maybe thru more Q&A like OP's platoedu or even make me write out some notes. Then I am forced to curate videos and maybe be more productive.


This is a problem I've had too, my current solution is to have multiple profiles on YouTube so whenever I click on a random video one it doesn't pollute my other education heavy account. Also just removing videos helps... but even then YouTube still pushes edu-tainment over harder educational videos.

One of my ideas that's on the backburner is build a BERT classifier to separate between Educational, edu-tainment, and random, then use that to filter suggestions from the ones of people that use Plato

Anyway if you have any good suggestions for better educational content I'd love to add that to Plato over the categories I have now!


Multiple YT profiles is a smart hack! And also, great work on the app!

The YT algo is pretty good - it catches on to what I want to follow and magnifies (ie suggest more content on) that topic. But it never pushes me to educational videos.

I suspect educational videos are best to watch on Coursera. I know people who just open up Coursera and start listening on commutes, etc - instead of infi-scrolling.

The pedagogical (instruction techniques, content structure, etc) aspect in those vids is different. I wonder if there is inspiration for creators/topics from Coursera?


This. I don't think most educational content on YouTube is worth remembering (or the best way to spend your time in the first place).

So I'd be cautious about an app that helps you memorize the contents of said videos. You might end up with a lot of superficial, clickbaity pieces of knowledge.


I invite you to share your own superior knowledge to the masses via your own YouTube videos so we can learn from you. Until then, I’ll learn from what is made available for others. Post back here once you’ve created some better content so we know where to look.


Papers, textbooks, tech talks, university lectures.

That's where you'll find actual knowledge and not in high production value videos which have to be financially viable for their creators.

It's hardly a secret that Youtube has a problem funding long form videos with a certain depth and instead favors clickbaity, short material. No reason to be offended.

As a rule of thumb I'd say everything with a sponsored segment is entertainment but too shallow for education.


> Papers, textbooks, tech talks, university lectures

Perfect list. Tech talks, university lectures (recorded videos) are almost as consumable as YT edu-tainment videos. Papers, books and textbooks are accessible but requires more motivation.

To the parent comment (zadokshi), if YT content is education, why don't the biggest creators make 5-10 videos on a topic, back-to-back? 5-10 is minimum for learning, example Coursera content - I'm not even comparing to semester/yearlong coursework at schools. Because there isn't a demand or incentive for that on YT.


When I saw Anki/Duolingo in the bio I assumed it was for language learning, but this is a great idea!

I too often watch these kinds of videos without really retaining a lot. This is a perfect complement to turn infotainment into time well spent, or at least, less wasted.


Yes!! I definitely spend a little too much time on YouTube myself, would you mind sharing what kind of content (categories) you watch in a pm? I’d love to get some better ideas of what kind of material to tune the question generations on


Same! Maybe someone could do some language learning on top of all the videos we consume on YouTube?


Languagereactor.com seems to implement some form of that


Great project! I had to laugh at the very first question I got, though: "Who is the sponsor of the video?"


Please drink your verification can to use this website.


I've always wanted to do this for Wikipedia, it could even be a Wikimedia add-on.

However, I have recently transitioned towards becoming better at compiling information quickly rather than spending a chunk of my day memorizing facts that I am not quite sure will be useful.


I’ve been doing something similar. If I read a blog post / paper, etc. where I learn a lot on a topic I’m interested in, I will catalogue a pdf of it in Obsidian with a tag and an optional note. This makes it easy to access information locally very quickly and I find I learn a lot more because if I forget something, I open up the resource, read the doc and, come out learning a little more. A kind of convoluted version of spaced-repetition but more passive learning.

Granted, I’m aware this probably won’t scale to many topics but a few years and hundreds of notes later, it’s still working well for me.


I don't even save the sources, I'll just assume I'll always have access to the internet and that I'll be able to find what I need when I'm thinking about it.


What do you use to compile information and do you keep track of sources?


It depends on the question. I do not have a list of sources.


Do you trust the information even after forgetting the source and not having the context your wrote it in?


When I say I compile information I mean I have a scratchpad in which I fill in the evidence that is relevant to my current needs. So I'll have the source noted there.

What I'm trying to say is that I rarely go back to the scratchpad of a previous question / problem, but I will approach every question and problem with a new search.

Trying to save information for the sake of it without knowing what future use it is going to have stresses me out, so I find that this fresh scratchpad approach works best for me.


Amazing, thank you. It even works great for music videos, I never appreciated the poetic lyrical context of Pantera before. ))

Small bug, the service requires a youtube.com URL and cannot handle an m.youtube.com URL, as happens when copying from a phone web browser or NewPipe. Perhaps you could support the mobile URL as well.

Thanks, great work!


Well that music video lyrics work is a very unexpected pleasant surprise! :)

Thanks for catching that! Will fix that!


I like the idea, but seeing how many new accounts added fake comments makes me a bit suspicious :)


I really dont like the new accounts stigma due to statistical reasons but to each their own!


Who chooses the videos? It seems ... opinionated.

For example, under 'Physics', we have "The big lie about carbon capture', 'Why (toilet) flushing isn't for everyone', 'The scientific basis for miracles', etc.


Yeah it’s not ideal yet the suggestions under each category I just YouTube’s own category labels so often it didn’t give the best results, but it’s something I’m working on!


Perhaps allow the user to integrate with his YouTube history? Does YouTube have an API for that?


Perhaps log the videos that users upload and suggest the most common ones?


Yep planning on doing that but didn't have enough videos uploaded to "fill up" the categories before posting the Show HN, so I just scripted some stuff based on the YouTube suggestions from some YouTube channels I watch.

One of my future plans is to actually train a BERT model to limit the video suggestions to something that actually is useful instead of clickbait... I have 2 different accounts on YouTube just so watching random videos on 1 won't pollute the suggestions from the other


Oh my god, this is something I've wanted to make or see made for a while now! I'll definitely be using this, the design looks straight forward and good too!

Any way to self-host to get around the 30 minute video limit?


Yes! The 30 min limit was just a heuristic to make simplify some parts of the generation (almost always captions exist, so no need to run whisper, and 30 min is 4-5k tokens so very little chance of going over and needing multiple generations)

Pm me (email in bio) and I can enable longer videos for you


This is a cool idea.

I wanted to have a bookmarking site that allows me to add my own time-stamped notes to YouTube videos I watch for learning purposes.

I was using OneNote without any such features.


I love this, great work!

One note: After submitting a video and answering the questions, the "New Videos to Watch" section appears to be videos similar to the one I uploaded, but may have not been uploaded to PlatoEdu. My expectation was that these were videos others had already uploaded and for which questions had already been generated. So I was surprised when I clicked on one and it started uploading. Had I known it was going to be added I wouldn't have clicked on it, as I'd first want to watch it to verify the content is high quality.

Again, great work. Bookmarked!


Yep, still working out UX kinks!

Having the user wait for generations was kinda a pain when I was using it myself, but the upload mean that's its now "instant" when you get to questions. I'll try to fix this today or tomorrow!

I'm thinking that it should generate the video content immediately but not add it to your account and instead ask the user.


Comparing this to duolingo is selling yourself short.

Duolingo creates dopamine hits under the facade of learning a language (which you never do).

With this, it's fun, and you can actually learn something.


That's the goal! :)

I think it's kind of similar with Plato, the value you get is going to be really correlated to the quality of videos you put in (I'm working on making the suggestions here be better quality right now too)

But I do think that there is still value to something like Duolingo, if it get's you to do at least a bit of learning over doom scrolling that's a good thing (even if it's much less effective than other methods). I think the problem comes up when something like Duolingo pretends to be better than it is and convinces people that otherwise WOULD be using the better techniques to learn, that's a bad thing, but if it's a replacement to nothing that's probably a net good

(also I actually did use Duolingo to learn German (B1-ish), and it helped as a starting point for vocab and simple grammar, I learned the most with friends and time in Germany but I don't think I would've been able to take advantage of that time without Duolingo... but your milage vary)


> Duolingo creates dopamine hits under the facade of learning a language (which you never do).

If you're using duolingo as your only source for learning a language, yeah. It's a flashcard app when you get to brass tacks. You won't learn a language by only use flashcards.

As a supplemental tool, it's great.


I think this is probably true for most things. Math, engineering, sciences; all need more than just memorization.

But some other topics it may be enough for purposes that you would want to use something like Plato for (history, etc)


This looks somehow like my app ClipMemo. The difference is that my app require you to create cards (called Memo in the app) by yourself. You select the start & end timestamp and you can review, repeat the clip. Besides YouTube it supports local video or other platform like Bilibili, China's counterpart of YouTube.

I'm not sure wheather my idea works or your work does. I'm also curious about which workaround solve this problem better. You can find ClipMemo on App Store.


Neat. I built a web app to learn languages that used podcasts and YouTube transcriptions too. The problem with YouTube was that their API was very limiting, so I ended up having to use a proxy and some unofficial API to scrape the videos. The whole thing felt very sketchy so I ended up removing the whole YouTube functionality and just focused on podcasts (https://langturbo.com)

I hope you have better luck.


This is very cool! I'm trying to do something technically similar by using LLMs to summarize the meeting transcript from youtube (https://parths-newsletter-78dbcb.beehiiv.com/).

Right now I'm doing this manually by copy/pasting into ChatGPT but I want to automate this aspect. I'm not very technical so any guidance you could provide would be helpful :)


https://www.videogist.co was mentioned previously on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38555629


Pm me (email in bio) I can send you some scripts and point you in the right direction!


I love this!

I wanted to build a “yt-campus” with a curated list of educational youtube channels.

This does it better, thank you.

One thing you could consider: allow your community to discuss the video’s. I’ve always wanted to have higher quality discussions about the Engineering videos I watch, and the YouTube comments really disappoint. Would you consider adding that? How about keeping your own personal notes per video?


Is NLU really this reliable yet? I tried making some scripts like this with LLMs, and it seemed to do very poorly. So, I abandoned the effort.


I did quite a bit of that too, I really had trouble getting it to generate good content from scratch but here it's using the transcripts directly.

I'm guessing it only really works well on scripts that are meant to be educational, because there already are "questions" implicit in the transcript of the video because that's the best way to present information when teaching something


I like the idea. I’m learning European Portuguese, so I added a video but unfortunately got an error that there were no subtitles. The subtitles for the video in question are auto-generated, so maybe that’s the reason? Would be great if I could use this for foreign language studies.


What exactly are you looking to do with YouTube and language? I might have a github repo you could be interested in. It takes YouTube videos, creates transcripts, translations and creates audio anki flash cards from it with audio on the front and text on the back


This would be interesting to try out if it's a public repo!`


it is, ill send a link to your email in your profile


Auto generated captions do work but unfortunately only English for now, it would be pretty easy to add other languages but I just haven’t had time to implement it yet. Feel free to pm me with the YouTube video I’ll try to see what’s the problem (email in bio)


really cool. A while back I've build this database of 1000+ hand-selected educational YouTube videos, so I'm going to try out a few of them to put in this tool :) https://www.edutube.app/


This is awesome! Did you hand select all 1000? I wanted to hand select for the categories to get some better starting recommendations but it was taking too long so I was a bit lazy and just scripted it…


Yeah I literally hand-selected all of them to remain the quality of videos that I wanted


If you have a list of the IDs of the videos (and maybe categories) I can bulk add them! If you want to discuss a collab of some sort feel free to email me!


This is fantastic! Is there a way to donate? This is the kind of software I want to see in the world!


Pm me (email in bio) and I can come up with some sort of premium plan haha (I'm thinking unlimited time length for videos + podcasts/other material) but very open to suggestions!


Looks great! On a related note, I developed a similar free tool [1] designed for K12 teachers, primary focusing on curation and discovery of educational videos for classroom use.

1. https://hulahoop.ai


Impressive. This is a cool idea.

Some improvements:

- I tried with a Spanish video, and it told me it didn't have subtitles.

- Would be supper cool to get them exported to Anki! Anyway, shouldn't be difficult to copy and paste it into Anki


Nice! Would be great to use on longer videos and focus on specific topics of the video.


The 30 minute limit is unfortunate, but otherwise it looks good. Thanks for sharing!


So far it’s basically a heuristic for the video having both captions and the token count for generation be reliably under the limit, but I am working on making it work for arbitrary length videos! I did some tests for 2-3 hour podcasts and it worked pretty well


If this works as I expect it to, it'll be something I've been hoping to see for a long time. Thank your for sharing it with us!


Do you have any specific type of content that you were trying to learn? Right now it's still pretty early/demo stage, but please pm me (email in bio), I'll see if I can tune it better to your use case!


I like Anki but I feel like Duolingo has far too slow pacing to be practical


Seems a great application of AI as part of a structured app, instead of just a chatbot.


How do you deal with YouTube Terms of Service for extracting transcripts?


International copyright agreements, like the Bern Convention, allow usage of content for educational purposes, as long as you're not replacing the original.


I want to make flash card form everything I look up this way.


Any particular type of content you’re thinking of? I’m currently working on adding podcasts since they’re pretty similar to YouTube videos, but I’m sure with some tuning I could see if it works for other things


Podcast is definitely one. But I’m not sure how one could get the real salient points out of some of the philosophy podcast I listen to without listening carefully the first time and writing them down.. Another would be for example when I ask Chatgpt how to do something in nvim.


Mind sending me an pm? (my email's in my bio) I'd love to try it out with some of the podcasts/nvim chatgpt responses you mentioned and add it to your account! 


  > Any particular type of content you’re thinking of?
When the wife is mad and ranting, can you email me a summary at the end? With a quiz for the important parts.


Now that is a strong need haha, I think will have to be on the Plato premium + plan


You've got your first customer!


Oh god. I did take notes during my last break up.. Maybe I could review those too


I believe readlang has similar functionality.


What algorithm do you use for spaced repetition?


I have a fairly simple implementation of the SM-2 algorithm, and just making the assumption that if you answered the question correctly then you have “perfect recall”. This isn’t exactly correct but I have been using it myself and seems to still be pretty nice.

But for the next version I want to use something called knowledge tracing to determine an estimated level of recall to then change the spacing


I recommend the new algorithm of Anki: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki


so how does this worK? you take the video and extract captions from it? and feed it to GPT? i am sorry, can you clarify?


Pretty much! I'm working on doing some fancier stuff with knowledge tracing but was out of scope for the mvp


timestamps on the transcript should be clickable to seek to that time in the video


I think there was some weirdness with resetting the iframe of the YouTube video when I first tried that, but I'll try to figure out a workaround!


I love this new Plato app, it’s useful and I educational. The interface is also very clean


how do we access it?


this looks great!


Nice


Very cool!


You just saved millions of students life's, A great tool that just solved a problem that existed but no one ever noticed




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