Telegram flashcard bots: PocketAnki, MemoCard and the rest

Telegram flashcard bots rest on one idea: your study material lives in the app you already check all day, so reviewing doesn’t depend on remembering to open something else. This page compares the two you’re most likely to choose between, MemoCard and PocketAnki, then looks at the open-source bots you’ll find on GitHub. If you’re picking one for learning a language, the table above has the short answer.

What a Telegram flashcard bot does

They come in two shapes. MemoCard is a mini app: a full flashcard interface that opens inside Telegram and also in a browser at app.memocard.org, with decks, folders and a review screen. PocketAnki is a chat bot, with no separate screen to open. You send words as messages, and cards come back as messages, each with rating buttons underneath.

Both use spaced repetition, which shows a card again shortly before you’d forget it, and both remind you to review. Where they differ: who writes the cards, how reviews are scheduled, what you pay, and whether the tool is built for vocabulary or for any subject.

MemoCard and PocketAnki: who writes the cards

MemoCard is a general flashcard app. You create cards, decks and folders yourself, or use decks other people share with you in Telegram. Its AI features run on ChatGPT and belong to the Pro plan: building folders, decks and cards in one request, fixing the wording of cards and adding examples, sorting cards into decks, adding phonetic transcriptions and making a copy of a deck in another language.

PocketAnki does one job: vocabulary. You send a word, a phrase or a short sentence, and the bot makes the card for free. Every card has a translation into your native language, a transcription and example sentences that show the word in use. Send la facture while learning French and you get the meaning (invoice, bill), the pronunciation written out, and two example sentences: a short one about paying a bill and a longer one set in a restaurant. The card demo above shows real cards for English speakers learning French, and you can switch to another pair.

If a card isn’t what you wanted, 🪄 regenerates it. /format sets how much goes on new cards: Short, Standard or Detailed, which adds grammar, collocations and usage notes. For a card that isn’t a word, such as a date, a name or a formula, /add_card lets you write both sides yourself.

So AI flashcards from a word are free in PocketAnki and paid in MemoCard. MemoCard’s AI reaches further, though: it builds whole decks on any topic, where PocketAnki makes one language card at a time.

Scheduling: Ebbinghaus’s method and FSRS

MemoCard’s README says it runs on “Ebbinghaus’s proven spaced repetition method”, the forgetting-curve idea that a card should return just as memory starts to fade. The README doesn’t publish its intervals.

PocketAnki schedules every review with FSRS, the Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler, which Anki also offers. FSRS keeps an estimate for each card of how well you know it and updates it every time you rate the card. You have four buttons: 🔁 Forgot, 😓 Hard to recall, ✅ Remember and ⭐ Easy. Forgot brings the card back within minutes, and Easy pushes it furthest out. After each rating the bot tells you when the card returns.

Which method suits you better depends on how you study, and this page won’t pretend to settle it. The practical difference is that FSRS sets each card’s next date from your own answers to that card, and how it works is documented in the open.

How the reviews reach you

MemoCard sends daily reminders for cards that need review, and you then open the app and work through them. PocketAnki sends each card on its own when it’s due, as a message in the chat with the answer hidden. You tap to reveal it, rate it with one more tap, and the card leaves the chat a few seconds later.

That difference shapes the day. With PocketAnki, reviews turn up one or two at a time while you’re doing something else, and cards due between 20:00 and 07:00 UTC arrive without sound. New cards are capped at 20 a day so the bot doesn’t flood you, while reviews are never held back. If you stop answering for a long stretch, it pauses and sends one message with a Resume button. When you’d rather have a session than a trickle, /practice pulls up to 15 cards at once.

What each Telegram flashcard bot costs

On 28 October 2026 MemoCard’s website listed Pro at $4 a month. Cards, decks and folders work without it; the ChatGPT features need Pro.

PocketAnki has no paid plan. Everything on this page, the AI cards included, is free. The /support command lets you send Telegram Stars if you want to support the project, and that’s entirely optional.

Other flashcard bots in Telegram

Search GitHub for “anki telegram” and you’ll find plenty of small projects. Most are bots you run yourself. These three are worth knowing about.

Flipi

Flipi is an open-source bot with FSRS scheduling, four grades (Again, Hard, Good and Easy) and import of Anki packages and CSV files. Its interface is in Russian, it has no AI features, and its README explains how to run it yourself with Docker. If you already have Anki decks, want them in Telegram and can host a bot, it’s a reasonable choice.

proFlashcardsBot

proFlashcardsBot, the Flashcards project on GitHub, is for learners of English. It ships about 100,000 ready-made English cards, brings each one back on fixed days (the 2nd, 3rd, 7th, 14th and 90th after you first study it), and uses AI to write short stories with your words. Its documentation is in Russian, and it doesn’t cover German, French or other languages.

DIY helpers for Anki

Several small bots take another route. You send a word, the bot fetches a definition, examples and pronunciation from a dictionary API and saves them to a CSV file, which you then import into Anki. You need your own bot token and a machine to run it on. These suit people who want to keep Anki as their main app and only skip some typing.

Unlike these, PocketAnki makes the card from your own word, translation included, in any of its 20 learning languages, and there’s nothing for you to host.

A MemoCard alternative for language learners

If MemoCard works for your other subjects, you don’t have to drop it. You can keep one app for exam decks and use PocketAnki for the words you meet in a new language. Getting started takes a couple of minutes: press Start, pick your native language, the language you’re learning and a goal, then send your first word.

The bot covers 20 learning languages, including German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish and Dutch, with translations into 26 native languages, so it also works if you’re learning English yourself. It doesn’t teach Japanese, Chinese or Korean.

For a closer look at how it works, see the home page of the Telegram vocabulary bot. Coming from Anki? The Anki alternative page compares the two in detail, the Quizlet alternative page does the same for Quizlet, and all comparisons are on one page.