Aroses turns your course material into structured lessons, a voice tutor that knows your content, quizzes, and spaced-repetition review. This guide matches the app as it works today — with screenshots-style previews of the actual UI.
Quick start (60 seconds)
- Sign up with email or Google and finish onboarding (goals, persona, username, birth date).
- Upload material — PDF, slides, notes, images, or audio/video — from your workspace or a course page.
- Watch the build — live progress as Aroses generates your outline and modules.
- Pick how you learn: Mentored Learning (Rose tutors you by voice) or Free Exploration (read at your pace).
- Practice & review — quizzes, then spaced-repetition cards so material sticks.
The loop: Upload → Build → Learn → Practice → Review.
What you'll see
Home workspace
Your workspace
Start something new
Video walkthroughs
Full screen recordings are on the way. Until they're live, use the step-by-step sections below — each includes UI previews of what you'll see on screen. When videos are ready, they'll appear here automatically.
Video coming soon
~5 min
Quick start — upload to review in 5 minutes
Sign up, upload a PDF, watch the build, open Mentored Learning, and try a quiz.
Video coming soon
~8 min
Building a course (grouping files & sections)
Combine lecture stacks, set a study goal, manage sections, and make a course public.
Video coming soon
~10 min
Mentored Learning with Rose
Voice vs text, Hold M vs Live mode, notes panel, and check questions.
Video coming soon
~8 min
Free Exploration — read, highlight, ask Rose
Highlights, study chat, voice dock navigation, and the practice room.
Video coming soon
~6 min
Spaced repetition review
Review hub, Again/Hard/Good/Easy ratings, and focus cards from your notes.
Video coming soon
~7 min
Standalone tutor sessions
Start a session, upload references, live notes, recap, and convert to a course.
1. Getting started
Signing up & onboarding
Create an account with email or Google. Onboarding walks you through:
- Persona — Student, Educator, Professional, or Self-learner
- Goals — multi-select reasons you're here
- School — students & educators only (optional name with suggestions)
- Username — checked for availability live
- Date of birth — must be 13+
- How did you hear about us?
Navigation
The top bar on every signed-in page:
What you'll see
Primary navigation
- Home — workspace with your courses, continue studying, streak, and review banner
- Tutor — start a standalone session or open past sessions
- Explore — community courses (sign-in required)
- Review — global spaced-repetition hub
- Profile — settings, theme, progress
2. Building a course
Two ways to create
- Public course — structured course with sections; optionally list on Explore when you're ready (create)
- Self Study — private; Rose drafts a plan from your goal, you confirm, then upload (create)
Upload & formats
PDF, Word, PowerPoint, plain text, Markdown, RTF, images, audio, and video. Limits: 20 files per batch, 1 GB combined; 100 MB PDFs, 50 MB other documents, 100 MB audio, 500 MB video, 20 MB images. Audio/video is transcribed (25 MB cap for transcription).
What you'll see
Lecture grouping on upload
3 files → 2 lectures. Drag files together to combine related material.
1 · Lecture 12 files combined
2 · Lecture 2
Build flow
- Upload files (optional per-upload study goal + polish)
- Build theater — live outline and module progress for each job
- For audio/video: review the transcript before generation continues
- Open the course — edit lessons, images, append quiz questions
Managing your course
- Sections — create, rename, reorder; drag materials within a section
- Edit course — opens study view in manage mode
- Refine with Rose — plain-language AI edits to structure or content
- Lesson images — auto Wikimedia images; replace, remove, or upload your own in edit mode
- Images embedded in PDFs/Word/slides are pulled into lessons automatically
- Failed uploads show a warning with Restart
Public vs private
From your home grid, use Make public / Make private on any course card. Inside a course, use the toggle switch:
What you'll see
Public Explore listing toggle
Make this course public
Private — only you can see it from your dashboard.
What you'll see
Course card actions
General Biology
3. Mentored Learning
Rose walks you through your course chunk by chunk — explain, check question, then advance. Best when you want to be taught, not just read.
What you'll see
Mode picker (when you open Learn)
Course mode
Per-course onboarding
- Goals Q&A + quick knowledge quiz
- Personalized course (reordered) vs Original outline
- Voice-first vs Text-first
- Or Skip the tutor — let me just read → Free Exploration
During a lesson
- Rose explains each chunk, then checks understanding — question in the dialogue strip (text) or a popup you can minimize (voice)
- Source panel — your original material alongside tutoring
- Notes panel — auto-generate, slash / commands, rich formatting
- On-image lookups from Wikimedia when helpful
- Welcome back screen if you've been away 5+ minutes — Rose resumes where you stopped
What you'll see
Voice input modes
Hold M
Press & hold M or the mic
Live
Auto-listens — just start speaking
4. Free Exploration
Read at your own pace with Rose available on demand. Switch modes anytime with the course mode toggle.
- Sidebar curriculum — modules, lessons, progress; scroll position saved
- Highlights — select text in Pink, Yellow, Blue, Green, or Purple; capture quotes to notes
- Personal quiz — turn notes/highlights into focus cards
- Media panel — synced transcript for uploaded audio/video
- Ask Rose! — text study chat about the current module
- Voice dock — hold M or Live; language & speed controls; Rose can navigate by voice ("take me to the section on…")
- Refine with Rose — edit course content from the study view (owners)
- Practice progress pull-tab — scores at a glance
5. Quizzes & practice
From any lecture, tap Go to practice room — then pick a tab:
What you'll see
Practice room tabs
From a lecture page, tap Go to practice room — then switch tabs here. Whole-course mix lives in the sidebar separately.
- Module quiz — MCQ + free response, AI-graded; Practice again when done; can mark module complete
- Focus quiz — your personal note cards (always practices all saved cards)
- Whole-course mixed quiz — separate link in the sidebar (not a third practice tab)
- Owners can generate more module quiz questions
6. Spaced repetition (Review)
Flashcards resurface right before you'd forget — module quiz misses and personal focus cards feed the same pipeline. Open Review from the nav or the home banner (dismissible until tomorrow).
What you'll see
Rating buttons after you reveal an answer
- Review All or pick specific courses/materials
- Scope: Both, Module only, or Focus only
- Settings: daily new-card limit, max reviews, daily goal, reset all SRS data
- Pause / exit mid-session — resume later from browser storage
7. Standalone tutor sessions
Open-ended help — not tied to a course. Start from Tutor or home. Past sessions live at /sessions.
What you'll see
Session modes at start
- Optional topic; up to 20 files, 200 MB combined (PDF, Word, slides, images, text — not audio/video)
- Paste screenshots from clipboard; add files mid-session
- Skip and just start talking — no setup required
- Live Notion-style notes (synthesized, not raw transcript)
- Voice: Hold M or Live; text input anytime
Inactivity timeline
- ~5 min silence → Rose sends a gentle check-in
- ~15 min → final check-in, session paused
- ~60 min total silence → session auto-ends
After the session
- Recap: edit, copy, download .md, print/PDF, share public link, regenerate, delete
- Build a structured course from this session
8. Explore (community courses)
- Explore requires sign-in — browse filters: All, Featured, Popular, Rated
- Preview outline before starting; full learn/study/quiz/review experience
- Your progress is tracked per account
- Creators: toggle Make public — only title + description appear on Explore until someone opens the course
10. Progress & profile
- Profile — General (name, username, avatar, theme, study focus), Account, Progress tab
- Progress rings — modules completed & quiz accuracy per course
- Activity heatmap — last two weeks of study
- Resume everywhere — module, lesson, scroll, mode, mentored chunk, even a paused tutor session
- Home streak grid — 7-day activity
Honest FAQ
Straight answers to the questions skeptical students actually ask. No hype.
What's the difference between Aroses and just using ChatGPT or Claude?
A general chatbot gives you an answer. Aroses is built to make you actually retain it. The model underneath is similar — the difference is the system around it: your lessons are built from your own course materials, your wrong answers get turned into spaced-repetition flashcards that resurface before your exam, and everything lives in one place that tracks what you've covered. A chatbot forgets you the moment you close the tab.
Short version: use ChatGPT when you want a quick answer; use Aroses when you want the material to stick.
Can't I just upload my lecture notes to ChatGPT and ask it to teach me?
Honestly — yes, you can, and for a single session it'll do a decent job. We're not going to pretend otherwise. The difference is what happens *after* that session:
- ChatGPT forgets everything when you close the chat. Aroses remembers what you struggled with and brings it back on a schedule.
- To make ChatGPT behave like a real tutor (explain in chunks, quiz you, make you recall instead of handing you the answer), *you* have to write that prompt well, every time, for every course. Aroses has that built in and applies it consistently.
- The easiest thing to do in a chatbot is ask for the answer and copy it down. That feels like studying but isn't. Aroses' default makes you do the recall.
- You're paying for a structured system that just works, not for something the AI "can't" do.
How do I know the lessons are accurate? Doesn't AI make things up?
AI can get things wrong — that's true of every tool in this category, including us. Two things reduce it: lessons are generated from *your* uploaded material rather than generic internet knowledge, which keeps them closer to what your professor actually taught; and the format encourages you to check understanding rather than passively trust. That said, treat Aroses as a study aid, not gospel. If something contradicts your textbook or lecturer, your lecturer wins. We'd rather tell you that than overpromise.
Isn't this just Anki or Quizlet with extra steps?
There's overlap — the flashcards use the same spaced-repetition principle Anki does, and Anki is free and excellent. The difference is the cards aren't made manually by you; they're generated from your course and, more importantly, from the specific questions you got wrong while learning. So instead of building decks, you study, and the review system fills itself in around your weak spots. If you already love making Anki decks by hand, you might not need that. If you never quite kept up with it, that's the gap we fill.
Will this actually improve my grades?
We can't promise a grade — anyone who does is selling you something. What we can say is that the methods Aroses is built on (active recall and spaced repetition) are among the most well-supported study techniques in the research. Whether they raise *your* grade depends on you using the tool consistently. We'd rather set that expectation honestly than make a claim we can't back.
Is using AI to study basically cheating?
No — there's a real line, and Aroses sits on the right side of it. Having AI write your essay and submitting it is cheating. Using AI to explain a concept, quiz you, and drill you until you understand it is just tutoring, which students have paid humans for forever. Aroses is designed around making *you* do the recall, not doing the work for you. (That said, follow your own school's AI policy — those vary.)
What happens to my lecture materials? Is my data private?
Your uploads and generated courses are stored in your account so you can resume studying — they're not posted publicly unless you explicitly list a course on Explore (title + description only; your raw files stay private). We send content to AI providers (e.g. Anthropic) to generate lessons and tutor replies; we don't use your materials to train those models. For the full picture — what's collected, retention, deletion, and third parties — read our Privacy Policy. You can delete your account and associated data from Profile settings; if anything's unclear there, email us and we'll answer plainly.
What if my course is really niche, or my PDFs are messy?
Aroses works best with reasonably clean, text-based materials. Very niche subjects can still work because lessons are built from your own files, not from how common the topic is online. The honest caveat: scanned or poorly formatted PDFs can produce weaker results, since the tool can only work with what it can read. If a course comes out rough, that's usually an input-quality issue, and cleaner source material fixes most of it.
Is the voice tutor actually useful, or just a gimmick?
It depends how you learn. For some people, talking through a concept out loud and hearing it explained back is genuinely how things click — it's closer to office hours than to reading. For others, text is faster and they'll skip it. It's there as an option, not a requirement, and you can use Aroses fully without it. We'd rather it earn its place than oversell it.
What if I just want a quick answer, not a full lesson?
Then a chatbot is honestly the faster tool for that one moment, and we won't pretend otherwise. Aroses is built for the times you need something to *stick* — before an exam, across a whole semester, for material you'll be tested on. Quick one-off lookups aren't what it's optimized for.
Quick app questions
How features in Aroses fit together — see the sections above for walkthroughs.
What's the difference between Mentored Learning and a Tutor Session?
Mentored Learning follows a structured lesson plan from a course you built — Rose explains chunk by chunk, checks your understanding, and advances when you're ready. A Tutor Session is open-ended help on any topic (exam prep, homework, concept review). Great for a quick deep dive; you can turn a session into a full course afterward.
Voice vs text — which should I use?
Voice is best for being taught and conversational back-and-forth. Text is best for dense reading and quiet study. Switch anytime — mentored mode supports both. If you run out of voice time for the month, the app switches you to text automatically so you can keep studying.