Study guide maker
Paste your lecture notes, however messy, or upload the PDF or slides. Get back a summary, a clean outline, key terms and practice questions you can actually revise from.
The AI version rewrites and fills gaps from your notes. The offline version never leaves your browser.
Your study guide appears here
Four parts, in the order you should use them: read the summary, skim the outline, learn the key terms, then close everything and answer the questions.
How messy notes become a study guide
A study guide is not a shorter copy of your notes. It is the same material rearranged for recall. Step through what the tool does to a real set of biology notes.
What you typed in class: fragments, arrows, abbreviations, all in lecture order.
chlorophyll: green pigment, absorbs red+blue
light rxns in thylakoid → ATP + NADPH
stomata = leaf pores, CO2 in
Calvin cycle - stroma, fixes CO2
Rubisco: enzyme, fixes CO2 onto RuBP
Why a study guide beats rereading
Rereading notes feels productive because the material becomes familiar, but familiarity is not the same as being able to recall it in an exam. In the large review of learning techniques by John Dunlosky and colleagues (2013), rereading and highlighting were rated low utility, while practice testing and spaced practice were rated high. A good study guide is built to support exactly those two habits: it ends in questions, and it is small enough to review several times before the exam.
How to use the guide you just made
- Check it. Compare the key terms with your slides or textbook. Fixing a wrong definition is itself good revision.
- Cover and answer. Hide the answers and work through the questions out loud or on paper.
- Turn misses into cards. Send the guide to the flashcard maker and drill the ones you got wrong.
- Test under exam conditions. A few days before the exam, generate a practice test from the same notes.
Studying biology? Zoom into a leaf with ahaboo’s photosynthesis explainer first, then close the tab and quiz yourself from your guide.
Want to build it by hand?
Writing the guide yourself is slower but a strong way to learn. Print one of our study guide templates, or take your next lecture in Cornell format so the guide is half-built before you leave the room.
Questions students ask
How do I turn my notes into a study guide?
Paste your notes into the box and press "Build study guide". You get a short summary, a cleaned-up outline, a list of key terms with definitions and exam-style questions with answers. The quick version runs instantly in your browser; the AI version rewrites and fills gaps from what you pasted.
Can AI make a study guide from a PDF or PowerPoint?
Yes. Press "Upload file" above the notes box and choose a PDF with selectable text, a Word .docx or a PowerPoint .pptx. The text is extracted in your browser (the file itself is not uploaded) and dropped into the box, ready for "Build study guide". Scanned PDFs and photos of handwritten notes (JPG, PNG, HEIC) work too: press "Read with AI" and up to 10 pages are transcribed by an AI vision model.
Is the study guide maker free?
Yes. There is no account, no trial and no watermark. The AI button has a fair-use limit of about 20 requests per 10 minutes per visitor so the service stays free for everyone.
What happens to the notes I paste?
The quick (offline) guide is built entirely in your browser. When you press the AI button, the notes are sent once to generate the guide and are not stored by NoteSynthesis. Your last notes are saved in your own browser so you do not lose them; you can clear them any time.
Will the AI make things up?
It is instructed to work only from your notes and not to invent dates, citations or statistics. It can still misread messy notes, so check the guide against your lecture slides or textbook before an exam, which is also a good revision exercise.
What makes a good study guide?
A good study guide is shorter than your notes, organised by topic rather than by lecture order, and built around questions you can answer from memory. Research on learning techniques (Dunlosky et al., 2013) rates practice testing and spaced practice as the most effective, so a guide should end in questions, not just highlights.
How long can my notes be?
Up to 12,000 characters per run, roughly 4 to 6 pages of typed notes. For a whole course, build one guide per lecture or chapter; smaller guides are easier to review anyway.