Echo Recall

Memorize your notes and paragraphs actively with spaced repetition and retrospective revision timetable directly inside Obsidian.

Echo Recall turns your own notes into an active-recall study tool. It turns your long study notes into a dynamic memory game. You read your real note, parts of it get hidden, and you try to remember them before revealing.

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1. What problem does this solve?

Flashcard apps (like Anki) chop your notes into tiny, out-of-context cards. You lose the "big picture." Echo Recall keeps your note whole and just hides pieces of it, step by step, so you're always recalling things in context.

2. Recall Modes

Go to Settings → Echo Recall → Recall Mode and pick ONE. Only one mode runs at a time.

Mode	What gets hidden	Best for
Heading Recall (default)	The entire content under one heading at a time	Concepts, ideas, theories, summaries and explanations
Fill in the Blank	Individual words and phrases, turned into blanks (____)	Poetry, speeches, quotations, definitions, and anything you must get word-for-word

3. Workflow (3 steps)

1. Open any note you want to revise.
2. Click the [▶ echo] button at the top-right of the note (or run the command "Revise active note").
3. Follow the on-screen steps: read, recall, reveal, repeat.

That's it.

4. How a Fill in the Blank session works

1. Step 1 — Read it. Full text shown, no blanks. Just read it a couple of times.
2. Step 2 — Light blanks. Some words are hidden. Try to say the missing words out loud.
3. Step 3 — Heavy blanks. More words hidden. If you get stuck, go back a step and re-read.

At the end, you grade how well you remembered it (Hard / Moderate / Easy), and the app decides when to show you this note again.

5. Scheduling — when will I see this note again?

Two modes, pick one in Settings:

• Confidence mode (simple, default):
  • Hard → see it again tomorrow
  • Moderate → see it again in 7 days
  • Easy → see it again in 14 days
• Adaptive (SM-2) mode: A smarter algorithm (same one Anki uses) that adjusts the gap based on how well you actually remembered it, every time.

Exam deadline: You can set a deadline date on any note. If the deadline is close, Echo Recall automatically shortens the gap so you don't fall behind before your exam.

6. The Dashboard

Click the brain icon in the left sidebar to open it. It shows:

• How many notes are due today, with a "Start Due Notes" button to revise them all in one go
• A heatmap of your past revision activity (like GitHub's contribution graph)
• Your current streak, total revisions, and a breakdown by confidence level
• A table of every note you're tracking — tags, last revised date, confidence, deadline — all editable right there
• Tag-wise view — group notes by tag and revise a whole tag at once
• Archive — notes you're done with, so they stop showing up as "due"

7. Exporting to Anki (optional)

If you'd rather revise on your phone using Anki, you can export your notes as Anki flashcards.

7.1 One-time setup (do this first!)

1. Open Anki (the desktop app) and keep it running.
2. In Anki: Tools → Add-ons → Get Add-ons…
3. Paste this code: 2055492159 and click OK. This installs AnkiConnect <= Echo Recall talks to Anki through it.
4. Restart Anki.
5. (Optional) In Obsidian Settings → Echo Recall, check the AnkiConnect port — it should say 8765. Only change this if you edited AnkiConnect's own config to use a different port.

⚠️ Anki must be open in the background every time you export or update — Echo Recall sends your notes to it live over that port.

7.2 Exporting

• Click the "cards/layers icon" in the sidebar (or run "Export active note to Anki") while viewing a note.
• Your note is split the same way it's chunked for revision (in heading recall mode), and each piece becomes one Anki card with a "View Full Note" button so you never lose context.
• Images and linked notes are carried over automatically.

7.3 Updating after you edit a note

• Instead of re-exporting (which can create duplicates), run "Differential update Anki cards". It only pushes what actually changed, and resets the card's Anki schedule for anything that changed.

8. Where is my data stored?

Nowhere external. Everything: confidence, next revision date, deadline, tags, history = is saved as plain YAML properties at the top of the note itself. Your data lives in your vault, in your notes, no cloud.

9. All Settings simplified:

Setting	What it does
Recall Mode	Pick Heading Recall (default) or Fill in the Blank, plus the optional "full note" checkbox — see section 3
AnkiConnect port	The port number Anki listens on for exports. Default 8765 — don't touch unless you know you changed it
Deck name	Which Anki deck your exported cards land in
Tags	Tags added to every exported Anki card
Scheduling mode	Confidence (fixed days) or Adaptive SM-2 (smart) — see section 5
Simplify SM-2 grades	Shows only "Good"/"Again" instead of 4 grade buttons, if SM-2 is on
Cueing mode	How a hidden word looks: fully blank, first-letter shown, or "graduated" (starts with a hint, removes it later)
Enable typed recall	Adds a box to type out the passage from memory and get a % score
Enable [▶ echo] button	Shows/hides the quick-start button at the top of your notes
Chunking	How a long note is split into revision pieces: by heading (recommended), by paragraph, by sentence, or not at all
Interleave due notes	Mixes topics together when revising several due notes, instead of doing them one tag at a time (proven to help memory)
Click-to-reveal blanks	Lets you click a blank to peek at the answer (shown in red, so you know you cheated)
Don't revise callouts / checkboxes / quotes	Skip masking text inside these block types
Exclude internal/external links, embeds	Skip masking text inside [[links]], [links](url), or ![[embeds]]
Custom regex	Advanced: skip masking anything matching your own pattern

10. Credits

Open source - contributions welcome. ⭐

• sxjeel: Creator and maintainer, Ideation, UI/UX, Dashboard, analytics, Context-aware chunking, etc. ☕
• @DocGRD: Core contributor of the Adaptive SM-2 logic, base Chunking engine, Graduated cueing, and Typed-recall scoring. 🧩