Anita — AI-Powered Anki Deck Generator

Turn a plain CSV of word pairs into a rich, multimedia Anki deck with AI-generated native-like pronunciations and optional illustrations — in minutes, for any language pair.

Why Anita?

Language learners lose hours building decent flashcards by hand. Anita automates the tedious part — generating TTS audio (OpenAI or ElevenLabs) and optional DALL·E images — so you can focus on reviewing, not curating. Feed it a CSV, get back a .apkg you can import straight into Anki on desktop or mobile.

Table of contents

• Features
• Quickstart
• Installation
• Usage
• CSV format
• Configuration
• Cost estimate
• Contributing
• License

Features

• CSV in, .apkg out — point it at a two-column CSV and get a ready-to-import Anki deck.
• Pluggable TTS — OpenAI tts-1 by default, ElevenLabs multilingual v2 optional.
• Optional illustrations — DALL·E 2 images auto-resized to 128×128 px for clean cards.
• Local media cache — every generated asset is cached in a SQLite DB so repeat runs are free and fast.
• Language-agnostic — works for any source → target language pair.
• Clean card template — distraction-free front/back with audio playback and image.

Quickstart

# Install
uv tool install anita-anki  # or: pipx install anita-anki

# Set credentials
export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...
# Optional:
export ELEVENLABS_API_KEY=...

# Generate
anita generate examples/basics.csv my_deck.apkg --deck-name "My Vocabulary"

Import my_deck.apkg into Anki and start reviewing.

Installation

From PyPI (recommended)

uv tool install anita-anki
# or
pipx install anita-anki
# or
pip install anita-anki

The distribution is published as anita-anki on PyPI (the name anita was taken), but the import name and CLI are both anita.

From source (development)

git clone https://github.com/timpara/anita.git
cd anita
uv sync --all-extras
uv run anita --help

Usage

CLI

anita generate INPUT.csv OUTPUT.apkg [OPTIONS]

Common options:

Run anita generate --help for the full list.

Python API

from anita import AnkiDeckGenerator

generator = AnkiDeckGenerator(
    deck_name="Italian Restaurant",
    tts_provider="elevenlabs",
    generate_images=True,
)
generator.generate_deck("examples/restaurant.csv", "restaurant.apkg")

CSV format

Two columns: source word (prompt side) and target word (answer side). Header row is optional and auto-detected.

apple,mela
house,casa
book,libro
water,acqua

Working examples live in examples/.

Configuration

API keys are read from environment variables. A .env file in the working directory is auto-loaded if present.

Generated media is cached under your OS user-cache directory (via platformdirs) so re-running on the same words incurs zero API cost.

Cost estimate

A 500-word deck with audio-only (OpenAI) typically costs well under $0.50.

Contributing

Contributions welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md for dev setup, coding style, and PR conventions. By participating you agree to the Code of Conduct.

To report a security issue, please see SECURITY.md.

License

Apache License 2.0 © 2024–present Anita contributors.

Acknowledgments

• genanki — Anki deck construction.
• OpenAI — TTS and image generation.
• ElevenLabs — premium multilingual voices.