AceIn short: you upload course material, pick the chapter you need, and Ace breaks it into individual concepts, writes a four-option question for each, and rejects any question that isn't supported by your source or can be answered without knowing the material. You then study the set alone or in a duel with a friend.
The five steps
1. Start a new study set
From the home screen, tap New study set. A set is one subject or exam — "Physiology midterm", "Chapter 4: Photosynthesis", "Contract law week 6".
2. Add your material
Drop in a file or tap to browse. You can upload PDFs, PowerPoint slides, Word documents, ePub books and plain text files up to 100 MB each, or paste a YouTube link. A set can hold more than one source, so the lecture slides and the matching textbook chapter can live together.
3. Pick the chapters
Ace reads the outline of your file — its chapters, headings and sections — and asks which part? Narrow it down to what your exam covers. One chapter beats a whole book: the tighter the scope, the sharper the questions.
4. Ace builds your cards
While a short logo animation plays, Ace splits the chapter into the individual ideas you could get right or wrong, writes questions about them, and runs every question through its checks (more on those below). The finished set shows how many cards are ready.
5. Study
Open the set and go. Choose Solo to work through the cards at your own pace, or Invite to turn it into a two-player duel.
What you can upload
| Source | Formats | Good to know |
|---|---|---|
| Documents & handouts | Needs selectable text. Scanned photos without a text layer won't work yet. | |
| Lecture slides | PowerPoint (.pptx) | Slide text and structure are both used. |
| Notes & essays | Word (.docx), .txt, Markdown | Headings become the chapters you can pick. |
| Textbooks | ePub, PDF | Up to 100 MB — pick a chapter rather than the whole book. |
| Video lectures | YouTube link | The video needs captions; English works best today. |
More detail on each: PDF to flashcards · YouTube to flashcards.
How the questions are written
Most AI quiz tools send your text to a model with a prompt like "write ten multiple-choice questions". The questions come out fluent and on-topic — and usually far too easy, because the wrong options are obviously wrong. Studies of AI-written quizzes keep finding the same weak spot: plausible wrong answers are the hardest part.
Ace works differently. Before writing a single question it maps your chapter into knowledge components — the separate facts and ideas you can independently know or not know — and for each one it records the misconceptions students actually hold about it, while the full source passage is still in view. For example:
Concept: where nutrients are absorbed.
Common misconception: "The large intestine absorbs nutrients" — tempting because it's bigger and comes later in the tract.
Correction: it absorbs water and electrolytes; most nutrient absorption happens in the small intestine.
When Ace writes the question, the wrong options are drawn, in order, from:
- The concept's own misconceptions — the mistakes real students make.
- True statements about neighbouring concepts — options that are genuinely correct, just not about this. These are the ones that catch people who have only half-learned a topic.
- Only then, newly invented alternatives.
The result: when you pick a wrong answer, it is usually for a reason — and the reveal shows you which idea you mixed up.
How every question is checked
Every candidate question has to pass a set of checks before it reaches your phone. A question is rejected if:
- Its answer isn't supported by your material. Each question is traced to the passage it was written from.
- It can be answered without the material. Ace tests each question both with and without the source. If it is just as easy to get right without studying, it measures nothing and is dropped.
- It gives itself away. No "all of the above" or "none of the above", options in the same form and similar length, and a flag on the classic giveaway where the correct option is the longest one.
- More than one option is defensible. Exactly one answer must be correct.
No checker is perfect, and Ace is honest about that: every question stays linked to the part of your material it came from, so you can always go back to the source.
Ways to study
Solo
Browse the deck under your own thumb. Back and Next move through the questions, and answering is optional on any card — read through first, then test yourself.
With a friend
Invite someone and take alternating turns against a 15-second clock. After every answer both phones show the correct option for three seconds. Faster correct answers score more, and Ace names a winner at the end. How duels work.
On a schedule
Use the calendar to book study sessions of 30, 45 or 60 minutes, solo or with a friend (and copy them to Google Calendar if you connect it), so revision is spread over the weeks before an exam instead of crammed into one night — the approach research calls spaced practice.
Tips for better questions
- Scope tightly. Pick the two chapters on the exam, not the whole textbook.
- Use text-based files. Exported PDFs and slide decks work far better than phone photos of pages.
- Pair slides with the reading. Slides are terse; the textbook chapter gives Ace the explanations it needs for good wrong answers.
- For videos, pick captioned lectures. Auto-captions work, but clear speech gives cleaner questions.