Free study tools for medical students

Candid Tools can transcribe lecture recordings, turn slide PDFs into Anki decks with the slide images, make scanned notes searchable, and help you de-identify photos and documents. Every tool runs in your browser, so your recordings, slides and photos are not uploaded. Everything is free, with no account.

Lectures: recordings to text

If you watch lectures as recordings, a transcript lets you search for the part you need instead of scrubbing through the video.

• Transcribe Audio

  Speech to text with Whisper in your browser. No fixed length limit on a computer; on a phone, recordings over 30 minutes run in 30-minute parts. Download plain text, SRT/WebVTT with timestamps, or Markdown notes with timestamped headings or your slide titles as headings.

• Video to Text

  The same transcription for a lecture video file (MP4, MOV, WebM), with subtitles you can load in a video player.

• Remove Background Noise

  Cleans up a recording made at the back of a noisy lecture hall before you transcribe it.

Slides to Anki

Anki is free and imports CSV files, but a CSV can't carry images, and lecture slides are mostly images. Tools that make cards from slides for you typically upload the slides.

• PDF Slides to Anki

  Builds an Anki deck (.apkg) from a slide PDF: slide title on the front (you can edit every one), the slide image on the back, or consecutive slides as pairs. Pick slides, set the deck name and tags. No AI-written questions.

• PDF to JPG

  Just the slides as images, if you'd rather add them to cards yourself.

Scanned notes and lecture PDFs

• OCR PDF

  Makes a scanned handout or notes PDF searchable and selectable. Printed text works best; handwriting is mostly not recognised.

• Image to Text

  Copies the text out of a screenshot or a photo of a page.

• Merge PDF

  Combines a block's lecture PDFs into one file.

• Split PDF

  Pulls out the pages you need, or splits a long file into parts.

• Compress PDF

  Shrinks a large or annotated PDF for an upload limit. Pages are re-rendered, so text becomes part of the image.

De-identifying case write-ups and clinical photos

Before a photo or document goes into a presentation, a portfolio or a group chat, identifying details have to come out. These tools help you do that on your own device. They don't decide what counts as identifying, and they can miss things: you check the result, and you follow your school's or hospital's policy, including whether you may take or keep the photo at all.

A photo, step by step

1. Blur Faces finds faces and blurs, pixelates or blocks them. Check every box and add any it missed.
2. Blur Brush: brush over everything else that identifies someone, such as tattoos, wristbands, name labels, monitor screens and documents in the background.
3. Strip EXIF removes the metadata (time taken, camera, GPS location) from the final image. Do this last, on the file you will actually share.

A PDF

Redact PDF removes the text and images under each area you mark, rather than drawing a box on top that can be lifted off. Search for names, dates of birth and record numbers, mark them, then check the output. Redacted pages become images. For text you write yourself, the safest approach is to leave identifiers out from the start.

For a typed case write-up, De-identify Text highlights names, dates and record numbers for you to review, then redacts or pseudonymises them.

What we deliberately don't build

• Clinical, drug or dose calculators for patient use, or anything that checks drug interactions. These can count as medical devices, and established free tools already exist.
• AI reading of ECGs, blood gases, scans or other clinical data.
• Anything that uses question-bank content, which belongs to its publishers.
• Another spaced-repetition app. Anki is free and does this well; we only help you get your material into it.