Product Sheet

Decision summary

When Appreso is and is not a fit

Generated cards and grading can be wrong. Verify medical, legal, financial, safety, employment, compliance, or public-policy content against a primary source before relying on it.

What works today

Inputs Appreso accepts

Shipped means the feature is live in the current private beta. Unsupported means the feature does not exist in Appreso today; the row exists to make that explicit. Nothing on this page is a forward-looking promise about features that may or may not be built.

Outputs and practice modes

Where you can use it

How it works

The capture-to-practice loop

1. Capture.Submit text, a voice capture, or a single image from the Inbox composer.
2. Draft cards.Appreso writes proposed cards, each with a question, reference answer, rubric notes, time estimates, optional follow-ups, and Tap options when the answer is short enough to be multiple choice.
3. Curate.Save individual cards, save the whole entry, drop a card, refine a card, or archive the entry. Saved cards cannot currently be edited; archive and recreate if needed.
4. Practise.Practice brings back saved cards that are due and have not yet been practised today.
5. Schedule.Passing a card increases its interval; missing it resets the streak and returns the card sooner.

App layout

What you see in each view

What a card looks like

One example

Common questions

Practical questions

Privacy and data

Data controls and what to expect

Research notes

Background literature on practice testing and spacing

The capture-to-practice loop is informed by two well-studied ideas from the cognitive psychology literature on learning: retrieval practice (also called the testing effect) and distributed practice (also called spacing). These are not Appreso findings. Appreso has not run its own published trials and makes no claim that using Appreso will improve memory by any specific amount for any specific person. The references below are linked so readers can read the original papers and judge the scope of the evidence for themselves. For any passage below shown in quotation marks, the source text governs; if the link and the quotation disagree, trust the link.

1. Roediger HL, Karpicke JD. Test-enhanced learning: taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science. 2006;17(3):249–255. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x.Opening sentence of the paper’s published abstract, quoted verbatim: “Taking a memory test not only assesses what one knows, but also enhances later retention, a phenomenon known as the testing effect.” The experiments in this paper used university students reading prose passages, with retention tested at 5 minutes, 2 days, and 1 week. The paper itself is the authoritative source for what the experiments did and did not show; generalisation to other materials, populations, and timing is not established by this single paper.
2. Dunlosky J, Rawson KA, Marsh EJ, Nathan MJ, Willingham DT. Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest. 2013;14(1):4–58. doi:10.1177/1529100612453266.Paraphrase of the paper’s overall assessments: this 2013 review evaluates ten learning techniques and rates each as high, moderate, or low utility based on the available evidence at the time of writing. Practice testing and distributed practice receive high utility ratings. The paper discusses boundary conditions across learning conditions, learner characteristics, materials, criterion tasks, educational contexts, and implementation demands. Readers should treat the linked article as the authoritative text; a short summary cannot substitute for the full review.
3. Cepeda NJ, Pashler H, Vul E, Wixted JT, Rohrer D. Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: a review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin. 2006;132(3):354–380. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354.Paraphrase: this review and quantitative synthesis, also describable as a meta-analysis, examined distributed-practice effects across verbal-recall experiments. Across included studies, spaced presentations generally produced better final-test recall than massed presentations, and the best-performing spacing gap depended on the retention interval. The evidence base was concentrated in verbal memory tasks and included many short retention intervals. Specific magnitudes, ranges, and boundary conditions are described in the linked paper and are not reproduced here.

Appreso uses product features inspired by the general ideas of asking questions and spacing them over time. It has not established that Appreso reproduces the outcomes reported in these papers, does not replicate their experimental conditions, and does not claim their effect sizes apply to Appreso users.