Scholarly
Scholarly · Writing · Productivity · Leaning
Scholarly is a source-grounded AI workspace that turns the documents, recordings, and videos you already have into answers, study material, and finished files. Instead of pulling facts from the open internet, it builds every response from material you add, then attaches a citation you can open and check. Think of it as one of those AI study tools that also doubles as an AI research workspace for cited answers. Students, tutors, and researchers get a study companion and a research assistant in one place instead of five separate apps.
About Scholarly
What Is Scholarly
Scholarly is an AI workspace built around your own sources. You upload PDFs, class notes, meeting recordings, or videos, and then ask questions across all of them. Every answer comes back with a Sources button that lists the exact pages it used, and citations are checked against your linked material before the answer is saved.
The idea is simple. An AI study companion is only useful when you can trust what it says. Scholarly keeps the source attached the whole way through. That holds for a cited report, a flashcard deck, or a dense chapter turned into a narrated video lecture. It reached 170,000+ users by targeting a real gap. Generic chatbots answer confidently, but they can't show you where the answer came from.
It isn't a general-purpose chatbot and it won't write from nothing. Empty library? Then there's nothing to ground on, and the quality of what you get out tracks the quality of what you put in. Free-plan allowances are also lifetime credits, not monthly ones. Heavy users hit those limits fast.
Getting Started
- Create a free account at scholarly.so. No credit card is needed to start.
- Add your material by uploading files, or connect specific Google Drive files through Google's Picker.
- Ask a question in chat across everything you've added, or use @ to point at one file.
- Choose what to produce next: a cited report, a comparison table, a slide deck, a flashcard set, or a podcast.
- Open the Sources button on any answer to verify the pages behind it before you rely on it.
Product Information
A quick look at Scholarly's pricing, supported platforms, and performance.
Best for
The users, tasks, and scenarios where this tool fits best.
Users
- Students
- Tutors
- Researchers
Tasks
- Turning a long PDF into a narrated video lecture
- Summarizing scientific text with citations
- Prepping for a big exam
- Converting meeting recordings into transcripts
Scenarios
- Working through new course material every week, where Premium's 10 weekly AI Creation Credits cover recurring generation.
- Early-stage project research
- Group or school rollouts
Key features
Source-Grounded Chat
Ask questions across the documents, recordings, and videos you've added and get answers built from them. Use @ to link a specific PDF, page, or recording, or just describe the file you want and chat will find it in your library. Every citation gets checked against your sources before the answer is saved. That's the difference. The Sources button opens the actual page it came from.
Cited Answers You Can Verify
Each answer carries a Sources button that lists every page used, which is the feature generic chatbots miss. That matters most when you're citing research, prepping a report, or studying for an exam where a wrong fact costs you. No guesswork. Ask Scholarly to file finished work into a project or line it up for a date you name, and it keeps the context attached.
Flashcards and Practice Exams
Turn source documents and notes into editable active-recall decks without writing every card by hand. It works as an AI flashcards generator first. Feed it a chapter, get a deck you can edit. Scholarly adds spaced repetition scheduling, and you can sit a timed practice exam from any deck. Think an answer key is wrong? Challenge it and it gets checked against the source, then you can request AI feedback on the whole attempt. Paid plans add export to Anki and PDF.
AI Video Lectures
Upload source material and get a narrated visual explanation with animations, charts, and illustrations. Choose 15 minutes and you get 15 minutes: narration is paced from the real audio, and a short plan gets extended with new source-grounded scenes rather than padded. Paid lectures start on Freestyle, where the AI picks the format, or you can pick Standard, Illustrated, Short, or Manim Math Animation yourself. Each one ships with chapters, captions, a transcript, and interactive checkpoints.
Presentations, Documents, and Images
Generate PowerPoint slides, Word documents, PDFs, images, and diagrams from a text prompt, or use one-click suggestions in chat to turn a conversation into a study guide. It also doubles as an AI podcast generator: Premium supports podcasts up to 60 minutes, built from your sources. The same workspace handles production jobs that usually send you into three different apps, and the source stays linked throughout.
Seven AI Labs in One Chat
Pick the model that fits each job and switch mid-conversation without losing your sources. The roster spans OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, Z.ai, DeepSeek, and Meta, with xAI and Moonshot AI across the creation tools. Seven labs, one chat. If a model is down or rate-limited, automatic fallbacks route to another provider so work keeps moving.
Scheduled Tasks and Google Drive
Schedule a one-time AI task for any future date and time, and it shows up on Home and inside its Project with the start time visible. One Google Drive connection covers only the files you pick through Google's Picker, including Docs and Slides, so Scholarly can't browse the rest of your Drive. Nothing else. Your access stays limited to what you hand over.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Citations are checked against your linked sources and open the exact page, which makes the output usable for academic work.
- Seven model providers in a single chat, with one-click switching and automatic fallbacks when a model is restricted.
- Free plan needs no credit card and lets you test the core study tools before paying.
- Recording a meeting and saving its transcript doesn't use AI Creation Credits, even on the free tier.
Cons
- Free-plan allowances are lifetime credits, not monthly, so a single upload and one AI Creation Credit total run out quickly and never reset.
- Output quality depends entirely on your uploads; with an empty library there's nothing for it to ground on.
- There's no public API, so you can't wire Scholarly into your own tools or workflows.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. The free plan has lifetime allowances rather than monthly ones: 3 AI Chat messages, 500 autocomplete words, 5 quiz questions, 15 voice minutes, 1 practice exam, one free AI Creation Credit total, and 1 file upload. Those don't reset. Premium adds 10 AI Creation Credits per week and unlimited uploads.
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