Lecture to quiz: turn a recorded lecture into a quiz
Upload a lecture recording and QuerySpark writes quizzes from what is actually in it, so you can quiz yourself on exactly what your course covers. MP3, M4A, WAV, MP4, WEBM and more, up to 25 MB.
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- Free plan after the trial
- Cancel anytime
Drop a PDF, slides or notes
or paste a YouTube link
Quick answer
How do you turn a lecture recording into quizzes?
Upload the lecture as an audio or video file (MP3, M4A, WAV, MP4, WEBM and more). QuerySpark transcribes the speech, then writes multiple choice, true or false and short-answer questions from what the lecturer said, each with an explanation. Generation takes about a minute once the audio is transcribed. Recordings up to 25 MB are accepted, with caps of 5 MB on the free plan, 20 MB on Student and 25 MB on Educator. New accounts get a 3-day Pro trial with no credit card.
- Audio or video files, transcribed for you
- File caps: 5 MB free, 20 MB Student, 25 MB Educator
- Every answer comes with an explanation
- iPhone .mov videos need converting to .mp4 first
How it works
How to turn a lecture recording into quizzes
- 01
Get the recording as a file
A phone voice memo, an audio file you recorded on a laptop, or a lecture video your course lets you download. Audio-only files are much smaller than video and transcribe just as well.
- 02
Fit it under your plan's cap
Speech does not need music quality. Exported as mono MP3 at 32 kbps, about 20 minutes fits in 5 MB; at 40 kbps a full hour is roughly 18 MB, inside the 20 MB Student cap. Free tools like Audacity can export at these settings.
- 03
Upload and choose quiz
Pick quiz as the output and set the level. We transcribe first, then write the questions from the transcript, so what you are tested on is what was said in that room.
- 04
Quiz yourself the same day
Answer one question at a time and read the explanation on every miss. The questions you keep getting wrong move into your review queue for later.
Example
Quiz from PSY 100 lecture
A sample of what you get from a lecture recording on psychology. Yours is written from your own file.
Question 1 · Multiple choice
In Pavlov's experiment, what was the bell before conditioning?
- Unconditioned stimulus
- Conditioned stimulus
- Neutral stimulus
- Unconditioned response
The bell produced no salivation at first; it only became a conditioned stimulus after pairing with food.
Question 2 · Multiple choice
Taking away a teenager's chores after good grades is an example of what?
- Positive reinforcement
- Negative reinforcement
- Positive punishment
- Negative punishment
Removing something unpleasant to increase a behavior is negative reinforcement.
What your quizzes include
- Multiple choice, true or false and short-answer questions written from your material
- An explanation for every answer, plus the passage it came from
- Distractors that are plausible, not obviously wrong
- Correct answers spread across A to D, so you cannot game the pattern
How you study them
Answer one question at a time with instant feedback. Wrong answers come back later in the session, and the ones you keep missing move into your review queue.
Best for: checking you understood a chapter, quick revision before class, finding weak spots early.
How we read lecture recordings
We transcribe the audio with Whisper, which also pulls the audio track out of video files, then write questions from the transcript so you can study a lecture you only half heard.
Get the best results
- Record in mono at a modest bitrate; speech does not need music quality.
- Pair the recording with the slides for the richest set.
Studying a recorded lecture without rewatching it
Rewatching a full lecture is slow, and it feels more productive than it is, because recognising something you have heard before is not the same as being able to recall it. A quiz flips that around: you try to answer first, and only the questions you miss send you back to the recording.
In practice that means a 50 minute lecture becomes a quiz of 10 to 20 questions. The three or four you get wrong tell you exactly which stretches of the recording are worth replaying, and you can skip the rest.
Your recording or your notes: which makes the better quiz?
Your notes are what you thought was important. The recording is everything the lecturer said, including the explanation you were too busy writing to hear and the asides that often turn up on exams. For a lecture you missed or zoned out of, the recording is the better source.
For a lecture you followed closely, a quiz from your notes is shorter and more focused. If you have time, make one from each and compare where they disagree; that gap is usually what you misunderstood.
Audio to quiz: voice memos, podcasts and your own explanations
Anything spoken works the same way, not only lectures. A seminar discussion, a recorded study group, or a podcast episode you have the audio file for can all become a quiz.
One underrated trick: record yourself explaining a topic out loud for ten minutes, as if teaching it, then make a quiz from your own recording. Where your explanation was vague or wrong, the questions will show it.
Long lectures: splitting a recording that is too big
The limit is file size, not minutes. If a two hour lecture will not fit even at a low bitrate, split it into two files at a natural break, such as a pause or a change of topic, and make a quiz from each half. Two focused quizzes are also easier to study than one long one.
Things that trip people up with lecture recordings
Recordings over 25 MB need splitting or compressing first (a 60 minute lecture in mono MP3 at 48 kbps fits).
Lecture-hall echo and distance from the speaker reduce accuracy. Sit near the front or use a clip-on mic.
Apple .mov files are not accepted. Convert to .mp4 or export the audio.
Questions about lecture recording to quiz
Yes. Upload the audio file and it is transcribed before questions are written. MP3, M4A, WAV, OGG, FLAC, WEBM and MP4 all work.
There is no limit in minutes; the limit is file size: 5 MB on the free plan, 20 MB on Student and 25 MB on Educator. A one hour lecture fits in about 18 MB as a mono MP3 at 40 kbps.
iPhone camera videos are usually .mov, which is not accepted. Convert the file to .mp4, or record lectures with the Voice Memos app instead, which saves smaller .m4a audio files that upload directly.
Clear speech near the microphone transcribes well. The most common errors are uncommon technical terms and names, which can come out misspelled. You can edit any question that carries one of those errors.
Only if they were picked up clearly. Students speaking from the back of a hall are often too quiet to transcribe, so their questions and the lecturer's replies may be partly missing.
Yes. Uploads are private by default, never used to train models, and you can delete them whenever you like.
You can try it with the 3-day Pro trial with no credit card. After that the free plan includes 1 study session and 20 questions a month, with files up to 5 MB.
Record it with your phone's voice memo app and upload the file afterwards. Check your school's recording policy first.
Whisper transcribes most major languages; questions are written in the language of the lecture.
Every question is validated before you see it, so the answer is always one of the options, and most show the quote from your material they were written from. You can edit any question.
Yes, to start. New accounts get a 3-day Pro trial with no credit card. After the trial the free plan includes 1 study session, 20 questions and 10 PDF pages a month, and you keep everything you made. You can also try the question generator on pasted text without an account, 3 times a day.
Still stuck? Email us.
Make quizzes from your lecture recordings
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