endlessflow/flashcard-generator

a simple, yet powerful tool that processes user-input text to generate flashcards for study purposes.

The vision

To develop a simple, yet powerful tool that processes user-input text to generate flashcards for study purposes, with an option to export these in a format compatible with Anki, a popular flashcard application.

Installation Guidelines

Step 1: Setting up the Environment Variable

Before installing the application, you need to set up an environment variable for the OpenAI API key. This key allows our tool to communicate with OpenAI's services.

• For Windows Users:

  1. Open the Start Search, type in "env", and choose "Edit the system environment variables".
  2. In the System Properties window, click on the "Environment Variables..." button.
  3. Under "User variables," click on "New..." to create a new environment variable.
  4. For "Variable name," enter OPENAI_API_KEY.
  5. For "Variable value," paste your OpenAI API key.
  6. Click "OK" and apply the changes.

• For macOS/Linux Users:

  1. Open your terminal.
  2. Edit your shell profile file (e.g., ~/.bash_profile, ~/.zshrc, etc.) by typing nano ~/.bash_profile (replace .bash_profile with your specific file).
  3. Add the following line at the end of the file: export OPENAI_API_KEY='your_api_key_here'
  4. Press CTRL + X to close, then Y to save changes, and Enter to confirm.
  5. To apply the changes, type source ~/.bash_profile (replace .bash_profile with your specific file).

Please replace 'your_api_key_here' with your actual OpenAI API key.

Step 2: Installing the Tool

With your environment variable set, the next steps involve setting up the tool itself, which is built on Flask, a lightweight WSGI web application framework in Python.

1. Clone the Repository Start by cloning the repository to your local machine.

   git clone https://github.com/Endlessflow/flashcard-generator.git

2. Install Python Requirements Ensure you have Python installed on your system. This tool requires Python 3.6 or newer. You can check your Python version by running python --version in your terminal or command prompt.

   Next, install the required Python packages using pip:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Running the Flask Application Finally, to run the Flask application, use the following command from the terminal or command prompt:

   flask run

   This command starts the Flask web server. You should see output indicating the server is running and listening on a local port (usually 127.0.0.1:5000). You can now open a web browser and navigate to this address to interact with the tool.

Step 3: Enjoy

This should be all you need. Happy studying!

flashcard-generator's Issues

As a user, I want the text areas to resize automatically vertically according to the content that is inside.

Some work need to be done here on the CSS to make the text elements a bit more responsive to their content.

As a user, I want to be able to know the system is responding when I click a button.

Right now, the system does not give any feedback to the user when a button is pressed. This is most problematic for the generate flashcard button since it relies on API calls to openai's servers that can take a while to be resolved leaving the user with the impression that nothing happens when they click the button.

As a user, I want to be able to track how much each of my requests is going to cost.

It would be helpful to have a simple token counter that estimates the minimal cost of a generating flashcard given a certain input text.

I can see 2 metrics that would be useful:

• min. price for the next request
• cumulative amount spent (I imagine that would require some type of persistent data like maybe a browser cookie to start simple)