How to use Nexora

Before you start

• You need the desktop version of Anki, 2.1.50 or newer. Nexora is a desktop add-on; it does not run on AnkiMobile or AnkiDroid, though cards it has edited sync everywhere like any other card.
• You need an internet connection at the moment you ask it something. Nothing is sent while you are simply reviewing.
• You need a Nexora account, which is free. You can create one inside the add-on. It is what lets Nexora load its prompts.
• You need an API key of your own, from Anthropic, OpenAI or Google. One is enough, and Nexora uses whichever you give it. Your provider bills you directly.

Opening the panel

After installing, restart Anki. Nexora lives in a panel beside the reviewer, and there are three ways to it:

• Tools → Nexora in Anki's menu bar.
• The Nexora button in the top toolbar.
• Turn on open automatically in the reviewer in Settings, and it appears whenever you start studying.

The panel docks to the side of the window. Drag its edge to resize it, or pull it out into a window of its own.

Signing in, and adding your key

The first thing the panel shows is the account screen. Create a free account with an email address you control, and confirm it. The account is what lets Nexora load its prompts, and it is what lets you reset your password later. If you already have an account, sign in on the same screen.

Then open the gear icon, go to Connection, and paste in an API key. Anthropic, OpenAI or Google will all do, and Nexora uses whichever one you give it. Your provider bills you directly for what you use.

1. It reads the card you are on

Open a card in the reviewer. The line under the NEXORA name shows the card the panel can see, so you always know what it is about to answer about.

It does not give the card away. While you are on the question, any cloze deletion the reviewer is hiding stays hidden in that line too. It fills in when you flip the card.

2. Ask it something

The row of buttons under the card line are the quick questions. Each one reads the current card and answers about that card:

• Critique: what is actually wrong with this card, judged as a card rather than as a paragraph.
• Explain: the mechanism underneath the fact, not a restatement of the answer.
• Confusables: what this gets mistaken for, and how to tell them apart.
• Vignette: turns the fact into an exam-style stem.
• Mnemonic: something to hang it on, for when the fact is genuinely arbitrary.

Underneath is a box you can type into. It can see the card, but it is not limited to it. Ask a follow-up, ask something unrelated, or ask it to put the last answer more briefly. Enter sends, Shift+Enter adds a line.

Select any part of a reply and right-click to add it straight into a field on the card.

3. It never edits a card behind your back

This is the part worth reading twice.

Fix the card offers the edits: an emphasis pass, a fact-check, added notes, making an ambiguous card solvable, or a full overhaul. Whichever you choose, Nexora does the work and then shows you the result as a difference against your existing card, usually as two or three alternative versions to choose between.

A safety check runs on every proposed edit before you see it, asking whether the rewrite changed what the card actually teaches. Anything it flags is shown next to the version it applies to.

4. What it costs

Nexora is free. The model that answers is not: your provider bills you for what you use, at their published rate, with nothing added on top by us.

A press that takes several steps internally is one exchange with the model, and a press that produces nothing costs you nothing. Reviewing your cards costs nothing at all, because nothing runs unless you press something.

Every provider lets you put a ceiling on what a key is allowed to spend. Setting one is the honest way to try this without watching a meter.

Your own record of the work

These cost nothing and need no account. They read the review history already in your collection and they are switched on out of the box.

• The heatmap: on your deck list, and on each deck of its own. Every year you have used Anki gets its own row, and you can step back through them. Click a day to open the cards you reviewed that day. Under the gear you can change the colour, pick what a square counts, and choose which figures sit along the top.
• My Anki Wrap: a poster of your session, your week, this year, or everything since you started. Square for a post or tall for a story, saved as an image or copied to the clipboard. It refuses to draw one when there is too little to show, and tells you so.
• The end of a session: when you finish a deck, what you actually did, and how many of those were cards you had already learned and then lost. If any of them have beaten you four times in the last year, it offers to open exactly those.

If you are not studying medicine

The exam picker at the top of the panel has an option for that. Choose General / not medical and Nexora drops the exam framing altogether: no clinical vignettes, no weighting by exam, no medical analogies. It takes the subject from the deck and the card and works in those terms instead. Everything else behaves the same way.

Protecting your edits from a sync

Only relevant if you study from a shared AnkiHub deck. There are three ways to do it, and none of them sends anything anywhere.

• One press, on the card you are on. Tags the fields Nexora edited on this note. AnkiHub keeps your version of those fields and still sends you updates to everything else. There is a button in the panel, a keyboard shortcut, and a shield button in Anki's own note editor.
• Or choose the fields yourself. A window listing every field on the note and whether it is protected right now. Useful for a mnemonic you added to a field Nexora never touches, or for freezing the whole note.
• Or automatically. A setting, off unless you turn it on, that protects whatever a write changed. It covers every write and not only Overhaul, because a corrected fact is the same kind of local edit.

The state is read from the note every time rather than remembered. A sync, an undo, or a tag you edited by hand would all make a remembered answer wrong, and a toggle showing the wrong state invites the press that undoes your work.

Protecting a field writes a tag on your own machine. No card text is sent and nothing runs on our server. The tag prefix is a setting too, so if AnkiHub ever renames it you can fix your own collection without waiting for a release from us.

Making it fit your own collection

These are optional, and they are what stop an edited card reading as foreign next to the rest of your deck.

• Neighbours: Nexora searches the rest of your collection so a rewrite does not quietly duplicate a card you already have. The index is built on your own computer.
• Style matching: it measures how your cards are written, per note type, and matches them.
• Library: import your own notes and it will quote from them, with a reference you can check.

If something is not working

• The buttons are greyed out. There is no card open. Start reviewing, or open a card in the browser.
• It says it needs an API key. Open the gear icon, then Connection, and paste one in. Anthropic, OpenAI or Google all work.
• Nothing happens when you press a button. Check you are signed in on the account screen, and that you have a connection.
• An answer looks wrong. It can be. Nexora's answers are produced automatically and can be confidently incorrect, including about medicine. Check anything you are going to rely on.

Getting help

Email support@nexoracards.app. A person reads it. Bug reports are much more useful with the version number from Tools → Add-ons → Nexora, and with what you pressed just before it went wrong.