An AI note taker for students who learn from video

The lecture is two hours, and there are more this week

Rewatching takes the whole evening. The notes you typed while pausing don't say where anything came from. And when the one part you didn't follow was somewhere around the middle, you scrub around until you find it.

Claras won't do the studying for you. It gets the lecture into a form you can read, search and question, so your time goes to the parts that are actually hard.

It works with YouTube lectures, tutorials and course playlists, and with recordings you're allowed to make or download yourself. It doesn't sit in your lecture hall or join your video class, so you always bring the video or the file.

Three ways students use it

These are scenarios, not stories from real students.

A class your school records

Say your course posts recordings and lets you download them. After each class, upload the file in the Video or Audio tab of the web app. You get a summary with key takeaways, chapters, and a transcript you can search before the next class.

Uploads use transcription hours, counted by the length of the audio. The free plan's 1 hour covers about one class a month. Three one-hour classes a week is more than Pro's 10 hours, so if you record most of your classes, look at Unlimited.

A YouTube course next to your own

Say a professor's open course on YouTube follows your syllabus, in a public playlist of 20 videos. Paste the playlist link into Bulk Summaries and choose a summary per video. Then ask across the batch, like "Which video covers eigenvalues?"

In a batch, a long video is read only in part. For the ones you'll revise from, run each video on its own, where the summary is built from the whole transcript. The free plan includes one Bulk Summaries run of up to 20 videos every 30 days.

Revision week

Say an exam covers six lectures you've already run. Open each from your History, read the takeaways, and note the topics you can't explain yet. Then ask Ask AI one topic at a time: "Quiz me on the Krebs cycle" works, because it reads the passages that share your words. A general "quiz me on this lecture" reads whichever passages happen to match, which may not cover the whole lecture.

Where Claras isn't the right tool for students

Live classes

Claras doesn't record or join classes, and there's no Zoom, Teams or Meet connection. Links to course platforms and video calls don't work. If you're allowed to download a recording, upload the file. Recordings run up to 6 hours each.

What it can't see or hear

• Slides, board work, diagrams and equations aren't in the transcript unless someone says them out loud.
• A recording made from the back of a room, with noise and questions from the audience, gives a weaker transcript.
• Names, formulas and numbers can come out wrong. Check them against your course material.

AI can be wrong

The summary is the AI's reading of the transcript. It can misstate a point, merge two ideas or drop a condition. Use it to find your way around a lecture, then check what matters at the timestamp.

Other limits

• Shorts links and live streams don't work.
• There's no flashcard or quiz feature.
• There's no way to delete a single item from your History.
• Your school may have rules on recording classes and on using AI in coursework. Please check them.

Start on the free plan

The free plan gives you 3 videos a month and 1 hour of transcription for uploads, with no card. YouTube videos with captions don't use any hours, but a long recording of your own will need a paid plan.

As a rough guide, the free plan suits a lecture now and then. Pro suits a term of YouTube lectures, with 50 videos a day and 10 upload hours a month. Unlimited, with 100 upload hours, suits you if you record most of your own classes.

If you need more, both paid plans start with 14 days free, and first payments come with a 30-day money-back guarantee. There's no student discount at the moment. See what each plan costs, or look at how other people use Claras. Studying medicine? There's a page for medical students too.