I’ve been tinkering with Ricotta for about a year now and I'm happy to announce it’s ready to for others to use officially. Largely the time has been spent making the project a framework to spin up newer projects quickly which I can share details around if anyone is interested.
The app was born out of my frustration with Duolingo drilling me on words I knew. I moved on to creating custom Anki cards and found myself spending ages creating decks.
It’s free, uses spaced repetition under the hood, and focuses on helping you learn what you want to without a course structure.
I'd love to hear your thoughts or even feature requests: https://ricotta.affineur.io/
- If it's free, like you say here, that it's free.
- What languages does it work for?
- What's the process to start?
Things I'm curious about:
- Is this intended to be a business? How do we get surprised by this costing something or disappearing in the future?
- Can it work in the opposite direction, e.g. to help students that speak Chinese pick up targeted English vocabulary based on what they're working on?
That’s something that’s been nice about Anki. As long as I’ve got my laptop I can do reviews, even if I don’t have a connection or the internet is awful or costs money (flights, etc). It runs on everything too which has worked nicely on the Linux ultraportable I’ve dedicated to study purposes.
If anyone has articles for offline web apps I'll have a read through.
> - If it's free, like you say here, that it's free. I'm not entirely sure but no I don't think I will charge for this, unless I had expensive features users want as I'm out of pocket on this myself. Its namely something I'm hoping to learn from with marketing and foster a community around. I'm not sure where it will go as the moment its a passion project, with a wrapper such as auth that I plan to repurpose for profit in some way such as a second company or selling the code as a starter template.
- What languages does it work for? I can easily add support for others if there's requests so far these are what I added support for: Mandarin Spanish Hindi Arabic French Portuguese German Japanese Russian Italian Malay Persian Polish Greek Czech
- What's the process to start? 1. Add a word you wish to learn 2. It will generate 4 cards for that word with examples for you 3. Review the card based on your memory recall of "good" "okay" "bad" and you'll see the card based on spaced repetition more often until you have marked it as good enough times it will come up less frequently.
- Can it work in the opposite direction, e.g. to help students that speak Chinese pick up targeted English vocabulary based on what they're working on? I'm open to adding internationalization! But want to get the english app at a point I can justify the time commitment.
The bottom says: Ricotta developed by Affineur Ventures
Their website says:
> Find the Perfect Buyer or Investor. Exit on Top.
I give it a high likelyhood of enshittification, as soon as profitable
When I google that phrase it’s from an “Affinity Ventures” which is unrelated.
Affineur Ventures seems to just be a cheese themed container (hence ricotta). The website just redirects to a login screen for something called “holey triangle” https://affineur.io/
I don’t think this is a private equity side project…
Anki is one of my favorite pieces of software ever so I was definitely willing to try yours. Seems like the feature that defines your app is auto-generation of a card / set of cards. Didn't see any way to create your own card, all you can do is put in an English word and get the automatically generated card added to your deck. So if that's not working well the entire thing crumbles.
Interesting idea that might have a future if it finds significant improvement. I think if it was ironed out I would still prefer it to spit out an anki compatible deck that I can use in Anki itself instead of in the ricotta web app.
I'm currently working on adding first-class Mokuro integration for manga mode, bilingual user-provided or Whisper-generated captions for video, an HDMI-input mode with realtime lookups, and local/BYOK AI features. And once I add Yomichan dictionary support, I will be able to go multilingual too. I also have a beta available via the Discord that resolves some bugs that I'm trying to release very shortly.
I've added Anki integration and am working on WaniKani + JPDB sync. Hopefully more service integrations soon too. I like to have nice defaults but let users keep their flashcards wherever they like. Ricotta too if there were an API.
I could have it output the deck into Anki I like that idea. I wrote a script that did this from CSV but it didn't have audio so I moved to this making the first gen of this app - its open sourced here if you would like to repurpose it https://github.com/Amber-Williams/language-flashcard-app-gpt.... I could try and find my code I make to generate the Anki deck if anyones interested as well.
Custom cards is something I agree is a nice to have. If you have preferences please share I'll try to add them to future feature updates.
I tried the best I can to test specially Japanese and Chinese without speaking those languages myself.
the app uses real human content (audio and text) for the most part, so hopefully it comes natural enough. there is still some AI though
I have been using Babbel, and while it's nice to have mini lesson to take each day... they offer no option to write out notes, or to look at the grammar and get some context, no extra examples and flashcard system is just awful.
I'm not really sure what to do with this -- I thought you wanted someone to take a look at some Japanese content, but I can't find any in the app/tutorial.
Stats for FSRS here (and elsewhere) [0].
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/18csuer/fsrs_is_now_t...
Anki uses this FSRS which is an open sourced algorithm https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki
But what you ask is not feasible, neither I nor OP have 700 millions of reviews to stack up against FSRS.
I have my own experience and a bunch of simulations, and if FSRS were better I would have switched to it.
The reason in my case btw is that FSRS is generic, mine is tailor made for languages - big difference.
Agreed would be swimming against the tide rolling a custom one. Anki's is awesome! This app functions much the same just makes card generation MUCH faster than Anki.
Personally I find Duolingo great for Japanese, I have the opposite problem: I run out of hearts if I try to do review and the app rarely gives me much old content, so I don't practice it. If this could come up with Duolingo-esque lessons for different levels I might use it to supplement. But letting users choose words/a topic is not necessarily important, most people don't know what they should study so it might be better to have "recommended" premade decks for different levels.
>The AI coming up with words for you doesn't add a ton of value, most languages have standardized tests with good word lists that learners should already be using. Adding the issues others mentioned, I think this is feasible but needs agents taking additional steps to mimic what a real tutor would do and formulate a useful short lesson.
I plan to refine the content certainly. If you have examples I could use for a baseline to achieve what you want that would help me back test against I'll try to add that into the next release batch.
> If this could come up with Duolingo-esque lessons for different levels I might use it to supplement. I see the app to be used in tandem with a structured lesson rather than structured lessons in the app. Similar to an Anki study deck.
I had looked into lessons for the app on my 3rd iteration of this and went through a massive refactor for it all to be lesson based. In the end, it felt like AI slop so I kept it simple with vocab to start. In any case, I will refine the marketing copy to reflect that.
I see from your LinkedIn for the site that the application: "automatically generates personalized Anki decks. With integrated spaced repetition, automated word examples, and native audio, it lets you build efficient, focused lessons—no rigid courses required."
Based on the wording and having used the application briefly before the application crashed, I'm assuming this is some kind of LLM backend that generates the text data for the cards as well as the audio from a TTS model for each card?
Please correct me if I'm wrong on that, because I've personally worked to build something similar for personal use and would love to read more about your framework and what's going on under the hood.
You're welcome to repurpose the code. It uses web text-speech api which I had a fair amount of beta feedback that the voices sounded robotic. So moved to a TTS model in the backend. This came with a load of heavy processing along with a translation model which crashed my app when I initially released it on r/languagelearning that had I had fun challenges to scale.
If its an app just for you, you can get away with more and greatly simplify the app.
Congrats on the launch. The website and the product seem really slick and you should be proud. The above questions are my honest reaction to seeing your site.
I have a test account and demo video I'm working on. I'll shoot it over later this week when I have one or the other so you can check it out without commitment or data concerns.
Thanks for the feedback!
However, I am concerned that it is free. Am I the product?
This one has a fair amount of security and wrappers around the latest update I plan to repurpose for profit so unfortunately this project is not. Though I'm happy to share how its built if you have questions.
> compatible with existing anki decks?
No its not currently. How would you like it to work with Anki?
Anki recently updated to include (the much better) FSRS4.5 algorithm alongside their usual (and still default) SM-2.