The Filmina app: how it works, from lecture slides to exam day

If you heard about the Filmina app and want to know how it works, here is the short version. Filmina is a web app that explains your lecture slides and class PDFs out loud, one slide at a time, while a frame on the page shows you exactly which part it's talking about. It runs in your browser on any computer, tablet or phone, with nothing to install: you sign in with your email, upload the file and it starts explaining.

Listening to the lecture is only the first step, though. Around that explanation there's a chat that answers from your own material, a review mode that makes you remember before it shows you anything, a practice mode with questions, and a summary that builds itself. The goal is to cover the whole stretch from the day you get the slides to the day of the exam.

In this post I'll walk you through how Filmina works and how I actually use it, step by step, with an example: a sixty-slide Microbiology lecture full of diagrams, tables and very little text, the kind that made sense in class and stopped making sense at home.

What Filmina is, in one sentence

Filmina does what your professor did in the lecture hall, for when you're studying on your own. It isn't a text-to-speech reader. A reader says what's written on the page, and a slide almost never has the important part written down. It has three words, an arrow and a diagram that only made sense because someone was talking you through it.

I built it because I needed it. I had a deck of more than a hundred slides for an exam, and what I was missing wasn't a summary: it was someone to explain each slide to me. Filmina explains the slide instead of reading it, and that difference is the whole product.

Step 1: upload the slides

First you sign in with your email. There's no password: you get a code by email and you're in. Everything you study lives in your account, so you can start a lecture on your laptop and pick it up on your phone on the bus.

Then you upload the file. It takes PDFs and presentations from PowerPoint (.pptx or .ppt), Keynote (.key) or OpenDocument (.odp), up to 30 MB. Presentations get converted to PDF on the server, so you don't need PowerPoint, or a Mac to open a Keynote file.

There's one condition that matters: the file needs real text in it. If it's a scanned handout, just a picture of each page with no text layer, Filmina tells you it can't read it instead of making things up. In that case, ask your professor for the original deck or run the file through OCR first.

A small thing that helps you stay organized: lectures go into folders, one per course. If you upload "Gram-negative bacteria" as the fourth lecture in your Microbiology folder, it shows up as "4. Gram-negative bacteria", in order, without renaming anything.

Step 2: listen to the lecture

Every document opens a page with four cards. The first one is Study, and that's the explanation: Mina, Filmina's voice, walks you through each slide in full, in three to seven short ideas, while a frame outlines the block she's talking about right now.

A few things happening under the hood that are worth knowing:

• It looks at the whole slide, not just the text. The model also gets the slide as an image, so it explains the chart, the table or the diagram along with the words. On a cell wall slide that's just a drawing with six loose labels, the explanation tells you how the layers relate to each other instead of defining each label on its own.
• Nothing gets skipped. Code checks block by block that every part of the slide was covered, and anything missing gets requested again.
• At the end of each slide, it asks you something. One short question about what it just explained, so you're not listening on autopilot.
• If something's wrong, you flag it. Every paragraph has a "This is wrong" button: Filmina looks at the slide again and, if you were right, rewrites that paragraph.

It explains in the language the slides are written in, English or Spanish, with two voices per language (Mina and Mino) and speeds from 0.8× to 1.75×. If you'd rather read, there's a silent mode where the script sits on screen and nobody talks. I go into the details in how each slide gets explained.

Step 3: ask about what didn't click

Studying alone has one very specific moment where everything falls apart: you get stuck on a term, open a new tab to look it up, and fifteen minutes later you're somewhere else entirely.

That's what Ask is for. While you're listening, the raised hand in the dock (or the ? key) pauses the voice and opens a chat with Mina about the slide in front of you. If you had part of the script highlighted, it goes in as a quote, so you don't have to retype the bit you didn't get. When you close the chat, Mina picks the paragraph back up from the start.

The best part is that it answers from your own stuff and tells you where each answer came from: "From your classes", "From your notes", "From your material" or, when none of that covers it, "Beyond your material". Underneath, it shows the slides it used so you can go check them.

There's one chat per course and it's saved, so you can ask about this lecture, the whole course, or everything you've uploaded.

Step 4: review without looking

This is the part I care about most, because it's the hardest and the most useful. Review isn't a shorter replay of the lecture. It's remembering first and looking second.

The card gives you a concept, say "Lipopolysaccharide", with a short hint. You type or say whatever you remember, however it comes out. Only when you check do you see the ideas that make it up, which ones you got and which slides they come from. Remembering without looking is harder than rereading, and that's why it works. It's active recall, one of the best-supported study techniques there is.

The order isn't random. First come the things you couldn't remember last time, the ones you struggled with in practice and the slides you asked about. Whatever you recalled well recently goes to the end.

Step 5: practice before the exam

Practice is a round of questions. You pick how much time you have (about 5, 15 or 30 minutes), and that becomes 8, 20 or 40 questions, written from what Mina explained and checked against it before they're shown to you.

There are four levels that adjust to how you're doing: recognize (true or false, multiple choice), understand (put steps in order, explain it in your own words), apply (a case, a problem with numbers) and master (spot the mistake, explain it to a classmate who missed the lecture). It starts at level two and moves up or down every four answers. Miss a hard one and the next question comes from the same slide, with more guidance.

At the end you get a score from 0 to 100, but it isn't a grade: practice shows you where you are, not whether you pass. What you missed comes back the next day, what you got right once comes back in three days, and what you got right twice in a row comes back in a week. The full breakdown is in practice and review.

If you have an exam date, the course folder builds a study plan: you tell it when the exam is, what format it takes and how much time you have each day, and it lays out the steps for each day based on what you've already studied.

Everything around it: notes, summary and course material

Three more things round out each lecture:

• Your lecture notes. You write them the way you would in Notion, with blocks and "/", or dictate them, pull them from a photo of your notebook, or transcribe the lecture live while your professor talks. They live inside the document, and Mina uses them when she explains: what the professor said that wasn't on the slide makes it into the explanation.
• The summary. It builds itself when you upload the slides, organized by topic instead of by slide number. You can read it, listen to it in the same voice, open it as a mind map, or copy it as text into wherever you keep your notes.
• Course material. A textbook, a handout, an audio file or a YouTube video you add to the lecture or the folder, so Mina can use it where it clarifies a slide. If the material contradicts the slide, the slide wins.

What you need, and what it doesn't do

To be upfront about where things stand today:

• It needs an internet connection. The explanation, the voice and the answers all happen in the cloud. That's why it runs just as well on an old laptop, and it's also why you can't study offline.
• It runs in the browser. Chrome, Safari, Edge or Firefox, on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iPhone or iPad. Apps for Mac, Windows, iPhone and iPad are on the way.
• It can't read scanned PDFs and it doesn't search the web: it answers from your material and from what the model knows about the subject, and it tells you which is which.
• It can make mistakes. Code verifies that nothing was left out; it can't verify that everything is right. When the voice and the slide disagree, the slide wins.

There's a free plan, no credit card needed, with explanation minutes every month and caps on questions and practice sessions, and Filmina Pro, a monthly subscription that raises them.

Frequently asked questions

What is Filmina?

Filmina is a web app that explains your lecture slides and class PDFs out loud, one slide at a time, pointing at the part it's talking about. It also has a chat that answers from your own material, review sessions, practice questions and a summary of each lecture.

Is Filmina free?

There's a free plan that doesn't ask for a credit card, with a monthly allowance of explanation minutes and caps on questions to Mina and on practice sessions. If you need more, Pro is a monthly subscription.

Do I need to install Filmina?

No. It runs in the browser on any computer, tablet or phone, and you can add it to your home screen. Apps for Mac, Windows, iPhone and iPad are on the way.

Does Filmina work with scanned PDFs?

No. The file needs a text layer, and if it's a scanned image Filmina tells you instead of guessing. Upload the original slides, or run the file through OCR first.