- “Would you recommend spaced repetition?”
- “Yes, I find it worthwhile.”
“Sergeant Drill” is a Telegram bot that turns your study materials into bite-sized drills aka Anki flashcards and helps you learn faster. Way faster.
Its only job is to analyze the content you provide and generate drills, aka Anki cards, aka flashcards then help you memorize them. Sounds familiar? Great! That is how it should be. I wouldn't be surprised if many of you at least tried similar techique in school or university. Or, you know, everyday life. Raise your hand if you ever caught yourself reading and thinking - boy, how I wish I could keep this in my head - but you know you won't. Not unless you practice. Sadly, once you are out of school, deliberate practice is something you have to force yourself into.
Spaced repetition technique is well known and understood, but who among us has the time to sit down and create those flashcards? Certainly not for everything you'd like to learn or encounter during the day. Being able to present facts and figures on demand may mean the difference between winning an argument over dinner or staring down your plate in silent defeat.
Being able to recall on demand is a requirement for fluency in any field.
Much of the effort of learning goes into creating something that can be practiced and learnt. Plainly it's too much work. So, of course, we don't do it. We know how. We know, we should. Yet, we don't.
This is where Sergeant Drill comes in.
How ?
Sarge is incredibly simple to operate and absolutely everyone can do it.
Open up a chat with Sergeant Drill Bot and it'll tell you what to do and how to do it. But in a nutshell here's what you'll probably do:
Share it with Sarge
Wait for it
Validate it
Drill it
That's it. Simple, isn't it? Well, that's the idea. When its simple and readily available - it is a pleasure to learn. Makes it that much more likely that you'll stick with it.
Characters
Meet your esteemed LLM tutors
There's revolution brewing - no doubt about it. We hope our tutors will one day come "alive" and have their own peculiar traits and characteristics. It'll make the process more engaging and we think you'll like them. Great fun awaits.
Sergeant Drill
Quick'n easy to use - enough for most people. Uses a simpler large language model that's good enough to handle paragraphs and text snippets you wish to memorize. Simpleton - yet, it can handle scientific notation so you don't have to.
Major Rehearsechaff
Coming soon. Uses top of the line LLM. Takes comprehensive approach and generates drills from larger sources: entire PDFs and web pages. Great companion to full time students and compulsory learners.
Give us feedback
We can't wait for you to try Sergeant Drill and it is increadibly important for us to hear your feedback
Pricing
Pick your tutor
Our pricing is simple and we hope affordable. You get some complimentary tokens that you can use to try and see if the service works for you. Sergeant Drill will send you a payment link after they run out. You get to keep your drills and sources even if you stop paying and switch to the free tier. Oh yeah, you'll be able to add drills manually and keep on drilling.
Sergeant Drill
Perfect starting point
$15
- Will last you a month, or
- A book worth of content
- Store, vectorize, index sources
Major Rehearsechaff
the Devil of the Grind
$25
- Same as Sarge
- More capable LLM
- URL & PDF sources to drills
- "Talk" to your sources
Upcoming features
We wanted for you to meet Sergeant Drill as soon as possible, so we opted to start small with a simple Telegram bot. There are a few interesting features that are in the works and we'll ship as soon as they are ready.
Where did this drill come from again? Text files, PDFs, web-pages, etc. Sources are important! They all belong in one place. They must be readily and comprehensively available. Ever wonder why we never ask where a certain piece of information you share with Sarge come from? Adding or referencing a source every time you create a drill would be too laborious. So we keep the two seperate. Every source or study material you share with Sarge is stored, vectorized for easy matching, indexed - all to allow comprehensive access patterns and search. It'll be glorious.
We can absolutely generate drills from PDFs, text documents, whole web-pages, even images. Yes, it should work for scientific papers of which we are avid readers ourselves. This may sound like the lowest hanging fruit and we have it working, but decided not to release it just yet. What's the hold up? For the same reason LLMs can't count, they can't be thorough the way a human student could. They just don't know when to pay attention. By the looks of it, we may end up rolling our own custom model.
Private chat with "sarge" works fine for heterogeneous content, where you want to learn thigs here and there. Say, you read a blog post or an article in the news and you'd like to remember key facts mentioned. Your personal chat with Sergeant Drill would be the perfect place to do it. Learning a new field or subject, though, is different. Information there is naturally clustered and shouldn't be mixed with anything that doesn't belong in the same subject category. You also want to keep yourself focused. Very soon you'll be able to create separate topic rooms with Sergeant Drill and keep relevant content and drill decks in respective chats.
Outside of a few ML tasks Sergeant Drill service itself is very simple. There isn't a compeling reason for us to keep it behind a paywall. If you have the few technical chops required to host it yourself, we'll soon give you that power. Along with the source code. There are a few features we want to ship, some rough edges and kinks we'd like to get rid of.
Project itself is well scoped and would make for a great learning experience. We may end up streaming (re)implementing the whole thing from scratch for fun and open its sources to the public in the process. Stay tuned.
Self HostHaving a dedicated room for each subject comes with something truly valuable. Given a little bit of time and enough context our model will grow with you. As you rehearse and learn the subject so will our model. Eventually, the two of you will be able to talk. That is, on your path to becoming an expert on the subject, you may find you want to talk to a real expert. Well, with all this context our model will be in the position to answer your questions, provide reasonable background or act as a sounding board. In a way, you'll grow together. Think of it as talking to someone quite knowledgeable or having access to a tutor or being able to "talk" to your learning materials. How exciting!
Talk to your sourcesNatural extension of subject rooms is, of course, study groups - places to study and learn with your friends and peers. Makes sense, doesn't it? Same experience except you have people to push you along, help you when you get stuck or pep-talk you when you lose motivation, celebrate progress, face problems together. Being social need not be wastful. Obviously, Sergeant Drill will be around to help you study and answer your questions.
Study GroupsIt takes surprisingly little effort (comparatively speaking) to become an expert in something niche. It is entirely within your grasp to become one. On your own or as part of a group. Guess what. There could be others, who can't wait to learn the same thing. It would definitely go faster for them having you around with all the knowledge and experience you've accumulated. If you or your entire study group make names for yourselves, you could teach others and charge money for it, like real tutors. We give you a straigtforward way to start. You can "clone" your room and invite students. This will copy over all study materials and drill decks but not the conversations. One or some of you may join the group and act as a local expert. Sergeant Drill will do the drilling and take care of the money and you'll be around to help out, explain things when necessary, provide additional context and customize drill decks to better suite the noobs.
Monetisation for ExpertsThere's revolution brewing - no doubt about it. Our tutors will eventually come "alive" and have their own peculiar traits and characteristics. It'll make the process more engaging and we think you'll like them. The two tutors we've been working on Sergeant Drill and Major Rehearsechaff only differ in how they handle sources and possibly in the quality of their output. Sadly, neither of them will show anything in terms of personality atm, but this'll change. We even have a nickname for our dear Major - the Devil of the Grind. Great fun awaits.
Tutors with CharacterOnce you've practiced enough we maybe in the position to rephrase or formulate new cards based on the your learning materials as well as the drill decks you've memomorized. Think of it like showing up for a midterm, which is mostly based on materials you should've learnt but doesn't match everything you've seen in class to the letter. Such variation is important so as not to fall into 100% rot training.
Out of Sample DrillsThat's a fun one. Self-motivation is great when you have it but life can get in the way. It isn't necessarily a matter of discipline, sometimes you'll get lazy or forget about your scheduled session. You know how some people require a gym if not a personal trainer to exercise regularly? It is rarely about technique or better equipment so much as being motivated by fear to pay money but then pass up the service provided. No reason the same trick couldn't work with drills. Failed to finish the session within 24h of being reminded? It'll cost you ;) It'll be opt-in, so don't worry.
Opt-in PenaltiesThere are a few well known scheduling algorithms that claim better knowledge retention. They often require more granular user feedback. Evidence of their effectiveness, however, isn't exactly conclusive. We'll ship a few of our favorites, but please consider this. While switching scheduling algorithms may provide marginal improvement to your retention, it is really going from no repetition at all to regular rehearsals that'll have the largest impact and will always dwarf any marginal gains when switching rehearsal patterns.
Spaced Repetition AlgorithmsNot everyone is on Telegram - we get that. Having a dedidicated webpage is a low hanging fruit, so we'll get it done. We really did want people to get access asap, and Telegram let us do that without reinventing tha whole chat experience. We quite like that and we really think you'll enjoy it, too. Telegram did a great job and I seriously doubt it is worth re-inventing, but we'll see.
WebappMight actually do that instead or in addition to the webapp. It isn't terribly difficult, but we aren't fans of the walled gardens Apple and Google have built around our mobile devices. There's a straightforward way for us to get you native experience on every platform including desktop, so we just might.
This may turn necessary if there is user demand for better authoring experience of which Telegram offers bare minimum. Stay tuned.
Native App or Platform
Terms & Caveats
A few things and caveats you should keep in mind. We use a large language model. Those aren't perfect. Some drills may turn out rubbish or repetitive - just filter them out and have the bot drop them. We hope there won't be that many. Even with a non-trivial percentage of such cards, it is still incomporably faster than doing it by hand. Another problem LLMs suffer from is hallucination. When there isn't enough context, they may try and generate nonsense that's not immediately recognisable as something false. I'd say chances of this happening and then falling through the cracks in your validation process are quite slim. Drill generation happens over the documents and messages you provide - that should give enough context to the model. Else, you'll certainly spot it. After all, you aren't learning random stuff from the web, you likely want to memorize something you just read. Even so, keep this in mind.
We do keep the learning materials you provide and the drills we generate on our servers. Else the service wouldn't work. After all our model needs context to produce those questions and answers, and we better be able to schedule them for you to repeat. Any materials you supply are already yours and you can download generated cards locally whenever you want. Sergeant Drill will tell you how if you ask it for /help. If you decide to wipe any trace of that data on our servers, you can do it with /reset.
Author
Vlad K. –Hey there, I’m the person behind ‘Sergeant Drill’ and ‘Major Rehearsechaff.*
It is possible that generative AI will reshape and alter our entire reality. It may also kill us. Not much I can do there. I think, however, there are significant gains to be had by augmenting our every-day practices with a bit of gen AI. There's very real chance that all these models will remain just that - completion engines with access to the entire world of information and tacid knowledge built-in in the ways we can't quite comprehend or predict, but with little in the way of understanding, having goals, desires or any intelligence to speak of. The outcomes as mentioned not withstanding, we can put these tools to good use, and the best use for them immediately available to most anyone, is to keep doing what we have been doing, but do it better, faster, more effectively, more efficiently. I urge everyone to reflect on your practices and think how they can be improved.
I run a small AI-focused software consultancy in London at fullmeta.co.uk. If you're hiring developers I and a few of my software & ML engineers are available for contracts or full-time gigs.
I also launched git.ht, which made tech blogging as simple as creating a GitHub gist. You can read my hoots at vlad.git.ht
* top marks if you recognize the anime that inspired the characters