What Filmina is and how it works
Filmina is a teacher for your lecture slides, in the browser. You upload the deck and it explains it out loud, slide by slide, marking on the page which part it is talking about.
It is not a text-to-speech reader. A reader says what is written; Filmina reformulates what the slide says, connects it and explains why it matters, which is what the lecturer did in class and what is missing when you study alone.
You use it from the browser, on a computer, a tablet or a phone, with nothing to install. You sign in with your email and what you study stays in your account: you pick up where you left off on any of them.
How it works, in one sentence
Filmina reads each slide's text blocks and looks at the whole slide, writes an explanation split into ideas, says it out loud and frames the block it is talking about; when the slide ends, it asks you a question.
Step by step, that is:
- The deck goes in. A PDF, or a .pptx, .ppt, .key or .odp that the server converts to PDF first. For each page, the render and the text blocks with their coordinates are stored.
- The explanation gets written. The model receives the slide's blocks and its image too, so it explains charts and diagrams along with the text. It returns the explanation split into segments, each with one idea and the blocks it covers.
- It gets checked for gaps. The code verifies that no block was left unexplained and, if any are missing, asks the model again for those alone.
- It gets said out loud. Each segment is turned into speech with the voice you chose and plays while the frame surrounds the block it belongs to.
- And it asks. At the end of the slide a question appears about what was just explained, in one of four ways that take turns.
All of that happens in the cloud. Your computer or phone does not do the heavy lifting: it sends the deck, receives the explanation and the audio, and shows them. That is why you need a connection, and why it runs just as well on an old laptop. What it runs on and what gets stored is in In the cloud.
And after listening
Every document has its own page with four ways to study it: Study, which is the explanation above; Review, which makes you remember before showing you anything; Ask, a chat with the whole lecture; and Practice, a stretch of questions that adapt to how you are doing. Next to them sit your class notes, which Mina takes into account when she explains, and the summary that gets built when you finish.
What you need
- An up-to-date browser: Chrome, Safari, Edge or Firefox, on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iPhone or iPad.
- An internet connection while you study.
- An account, created with your email: you sign in with a code that arrives in your inbox, no password.
- The lecture deck, as a PDF, PowerPoint, Keynote or OpenDocument file, up to 30 MB. With text in it: if it is a scanned image, Mina tells you instead of making things up.
It explains in the language the deck is written in, Spanish or English, without you having to pick.