How Notability built a study tool that improves with every Claude release

Notes that students never opened 

When students take notes in a paper notebook, a doc, or an app, most of those notes are written once and never revisited. "Most notes students take are one touch: they create them and never view them again," said Matt Todd, Senior Engineer at Notability. Studying has traditionally been the student's own project: flashcards built by hand, or review material found online that may not match what they learned in class, while the notes that cover the exam topics sit untouched.

Students were already searching for a fix, bringing AI tools into their studying, and Notability saw the chance to close that loop where notes already lived. "It's the perfect context to get ready for exams," explained Marc Provost, Chief Product Officer at Notability. The goal was exam prep that asks nothing extra of students: nothing to assemble or organize beyond the notes they already had.

Study materials generated from a student's own notes

Notability designed Learn around a simple promise. "Notability Learn is like a personal trainer,” Provost said. “We wanted to make it easier for students to get ready for exams by removing as much friction as possible." Delivering on that meant finding a model that could turn a note’s content into trustworthy study materials.

The gap between models showed up in the quiz questions themselves. "Claude performed much better than other models, for example, on generating questions that were accurate, challenging, and varied," he said. Summarizing mattered just as much, since Learn also condenses long, complex material on a student's behalf. "Claude's ability to synthesize information is unmatched, enabling Notability to automatically take notes without missing a beat," Provost added.

Learn turns those strengths into three kinds of study material, all of it written by Claude. Flashcards answered a years-long user request: 'Through Claude we were able to finally generate powerful, useful flashcards from a user's notes,” said Alison Wu, Product Manager at Notability. Multiple-choice quizzes come with an “Explain This” button, with Claude writing both the questions and the explanations behind it. Live Smart Notes allow a student who would rather listen to hit record, and Claude builds a structured summary from the recording in real time. “Students don't have to worry about whether or not they remembered to write something down,” Wu added. “They can simply be present and listen.”

The first version of Learn shipped in two months, in time to anchor Notability's back-to-school release in 2024. The integration went smoothly, Provost said, in part because "we used Claude itself to improve our prompts and fix issues." The rest arrived in updates timed to new Claude releases: live Smart Notes, new quiz types, summaries, and takeaways in addition to steady gains in the quality of the materials.

Learn runs on Claude Haiku 4.5 through the Claude Platform, with quiz questions for Pro subscribers routed to Claude Sonnet 4.6. "We do a lot of qualitative evaluation of model output since there are so many different failure mechanisms," Todd explained. "Our most important metric when evaluating a new model is user reports via our thumbs up/down buttons." New models roll out slowly while the team watches perceived performance and builds confidence, and an internal evaluator runs on every release.

User reports have moved steadily in one direction: since Learn’s early releases, they have fallen from 33 per 10,000 questions to roughly 18, a drop of about 45%. "This is a good keystone indicator that user experience is improving with each new model," Todd said.

220 million questions answered

In the past year, students answered 220 million of Learn's quiz questions, about 600,000 a day, and viewed its Smart Notes summaries more than 1 million times. Every question came directly from a student's own notes. In April 2026 alone, roughly 273,000 students answered a study question, and the experiment is now a core part of how students use the app.

Notability's analysis points to a deeper pattern: students who use Learn, viewing summaries and answering questions, stay with the app longer, and their quiz accuracy climbs the more they study with it. Learn users also spend 90% more time in Notability. In an April 2026 cohort, 85% of Learn users returned the following week against a 58% baseline, and 57% were still active at week eight versus 37% across all Notability users. "Students who reach for Learn are already more motivated than the average note-opener," Todd added.

Beyond the student-facing product, Notability has put Claude to work internally with Claude Code and Claude Enterprise: shipping projects faster, creating advanced UX flows, and building internal dashboards to measure the impact of a campaign or release. "What used to live in one person's head or a buried Slack thread now lives in one place that Claude reads and writes as naturally as we do," Provost said.

Notability plans to continue investing in ways to make a student's own material work harder for them. The team is building a study flow built on three pillars: memorizing with spaced-repetition flashcard decks, practicing with multiple-choice quizzes, and testing with an exam mode that mixes multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, true or false, and mix and match questions into one exam. "Imagine being able to ask a question and get an answer grounded in everything you've ever written or saved," Wu said of a note-library chat the team is exploring. Provost's longer-term vision is a fully agentic version of Learn: "We want to look at notes and previous quizzes to generate the most personalized next step, whether it's a visualization to better explain a specific concept, a burst quiz to go over weaknesses, a quick two-minute explainer to review something on the go."