Notes are mostly empty. That is the problem worth solving.
Handwrite a word in class; Vocady fills in pronunciation, meaning, grammar and examples, then brings it back as a retrieval question that night.
Vocady is a vocabulary app built on one finding: the effect of note-taking sits in the structure of the note and in retrieving it later, not in the act of writing. These are the notes we keep while building it.
What the app does
- 01
You write a word by hand during class. Your phone reads it without sending the handwriting anywhere, and by the time you look down again the pronunciation, the meaning, the part of speech and two example sentences are already sitting under it. A photo of a textbook page brings in up to fifty words at once.
- 02
That night the word comes back as a question. Not a card you flip over — a question you have to answer before you see anything. Some of them ask you to write the word out by hand again, on a blank line, with nothing to recognise.
- 03
The order is not random. Words you keep missing, and words you have not seen in a while, come first.
Recent updates
Hear a word out loud
Playback uses only the voices already on your device, so it works with no network. Word lists gained four sort orders, and tags are now kept per language.
Wrong answers come back on their own
Questions you missed are collected so you can take them again, with a way in from the statistics tab.
Why this site exists
Every choice in the app is a claim about how memory works, and claims can be wrong. So the studies behind them are written out here with their numbers, including the ones that are inconvenient for a vocabulary app. If a study says the thing we built does not help, that is in here too.
Notes
- 002
Where words go missing
Students capture 91% of a lecture's main ideas and 11% of the details. Vocabulary lives in that 11%. Here is where the words go, and what brings them back. - 001
About Vocady — why it exists and what it is built on
Vocady is a handwriting-first vocabulary app for iOS and Android. What it does, why it was made, the studies its design rests on, and the person who builds it.
Frequently asked questions
What does Vocady do?
You write a word by hand during class. By the time you look down again the pronunciation, the meaning, the part of speech and two example sentences are already sitting under it.
Does my handwriting leave the phone?
No. Your phone reads it without sending the handwriting anywhere.
How many words can a photo bring in?
A photo of a textbook page brings in up to fifty words at once.
How is this different from flashcards?
That night the word comes back as a question. Not a card you flip over — a question you have to answer before you see anything. Some of them ask you to write the word out by hand again, on a blank line, with nothing to recognise.
What decides the order of review?
The order is not random. Words you keep missing, and words you have not seen in a while, come first.
Which languages does it cover?
Nine: English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Russian.