Cognia AI documentation

Cognia AI is a free AI study tool built for Australian uni students. You bring your own course material — a lecture recording, a PDF, a slide deck, or your own notes — and Cognia AI turns it into flashcards, quizzes, podcasts and an AI tutor that cites the exact slide, page or lecture timestamp it draws from. This page is the practical guide.

Getting started

Signing up takes under a minute. The free plan needs no credit card.

1. Visit app.cognia.com.au/sign-up and create an account with your email.
2. Verify your email and you're in. The free plan is active immediately — no payment step.
3. From the dashboard, create your first subject (for example, “BIOL2042” or “Year 12 Methods”). Subjects are how you keep material from different units separate.
4. Upload your first piece of material — see the next section.

Uploading lectures, PDFs and notes

Cognia AI accepts four kinds of input. All of them end up in the same searchable knowledge base for the subject they belong to.

1. Live lecture recording

In your subject, click Record lecture. The browser starts capturing audio. When the lecture ends, click stop. Cognia AI transcribes the audio with timestamps, splits it into searchable passages, and queues it for flashcard and quiz generation. Typical processing time for a 90-minute lecture is a few minutes.

2. Uploaded audio

Drag in an audio file you recorded elsewhere. Supported formats: MP3, MP4, M4A. Lecture recordings exported from Echo360, Zoom or Panopto work directly.

3. PDFs and slide decks

Drag in a PDF — a textbook chapter, a paper, a slide deck, or a scanned handout. Cognia AI parses the document structure (headings, lists, figures) so the tutor can cite by page and section, not just by character offset.

4. Pasted or typed notes

Click Add notes and paste anything: your own writing, a transcript from another tool, or a chunk of a textbook. Markdown formatting is preserved.

On the free plan you can upload up to 5 lectures or files per month. Pro is unlimited.

Study modes: flashcards, quizzes, podcasts

Every piece of material you upload becomes available across all four study modes. You don't generate a flashcard deck once and lose it — the same source feeds quizzes, podcasts and the tutor.

Flashcards

Cognia AI generates spaced-repetition flashcards from your uploaded material. The decks are accurate to your course because they are generated from your course — not a community deck written by someone else three years ago. The scheduler surfaces each card right before you would forget it, which is the bit that makes spaced repetition work rather than just feel productive.

Quizzes

Quiz mode generates multiple-choice or short-answer questions from your material, marks your answers instantly, and tells you exactly where you went wrong. Wrong answers feed back into your flashcard deck weighted to come up sooner.

Podcasts

Cognia AI turns your notes into a 10 to 15 minute conversation between two AI hosts. It's designed for the bus to uni, the walk to class, or the gym. The free plan includes 2 podcasts per month. Pro is unlimited.

Using the AI tutor

The tutor is the part most students use most. Open it from any subject. Ask anything about the material you've uploaded.

The defining property of the tutor is that every answer is cited to the exact slide, page or lecture timestamp it came from. Click the citation and you jump straight to the source. If the tutor can't answer from your material, it tells you so rather than making something up. For the full explanation of how this works, see the methodology page.

Good tutor questions:

• “Explain the difference between mitosis and meiosis using week 4's slides”
• “What did the lecturer say about confounding variables?”
• “Quiz me on chapter 6 of the textbook I uploaded”
• “Summarise the last 15 minutes of the lecture I recorded yesterday”

Free plan gets 30 tutor messages per day. Pro is unlimited.

Account, billing and Pro

The full pricing breakdown lives on the pricing page. In short:

• Free — AUD $0 forever, no credit card. 5 lectures or uploads per month, unlimited flashcards and quizzes, AI tutor with 30 messages per day, 2 podcasts per month.
• Pro — AUD $14.99 per month. Unlimited lectures, uploads, flashcards, quizzes, podcasts and tutor messages, plus priority access to the latest AI models. Cancel anytime.

Upgrade from inside the app at any time. Stripe handles billing — Cognia AI never sees your card. Cancellation is one click in account settings and your free account keeps working forever after.

Privacy and your data

Your uploads are yours. Concretely:

• Your content is never sold, never used to train shared models, and never shown to anyone else.
• Stripe handles billing so Cognia AI never sees your card details.
• We do not run third-party analytics, advertising or tracking services.
• You can export or delete any subject and all its material from account settings.

Full details on the security page.

FAQ

What file formats does Cognia AI accept?

Audio: MP3, MP4, M4A. Documents: PDF, including slide decks exported as PDF. Notes: typed or pasted text, with Markdown preserved.

How long does processing take?

Most files are ready within a few minutes. A 90-minute lecture recording typically takes 2 to 4 minutes to transcribe and chunk. Longer or very large PDFs can take slightly longer.

Does Cognia AI work on mobile?

Yes, the web app is mobile-responsive. Recording lectures works in mobile Safari and Chrome. Most students use the desktop web app for uploading and the mobile web for flashcards and podcasts on the go.

Can Cognia AI write my essay?

No, and we won't. Cognia AI is a study aid, not an essay writer. The tool helps you understand and revise your own course material. Submitting AI-generated text as your own work in an assessment is cheating under standard Australian university academic integrity policies.

Is Cognia AI just ChatGPT in a wrapper?

No. Cognia AI uses frontier large language models from multiple providers, but the system around the model is the point. Every tutor answer retrieves passages from your uploaded material before the model generates anything, and the model is instructed to answer only from those passages. That's why citations are accurate and the tutor doesn't drift into general knowledge. The full explanation is on the methodology page.

I'm stuck. How do I get help?

Email support@cognia.com.au and a human will reply. There's no ticketing system or AI bot in the loop on support.