Demist for business and economics students
Economics builds each concept on the last, so one unfamiliar term early in a lecture quietly costs you the rest of it. Finance adds a layer of terms that sound like ordinary English and are not.
What it does during a business and economics lecture
Demist transcribes as your lecturer speaks, picks out the terms you are unlikely to know at your year of study, and puts a one-sentence explanation on screen while they are still talking. You keep listening instead of writing down a word to look up later.
Afterwards you have the full transcript, a glossary of every term that came up, a summary, and flashcards scheduled by spaced repetition so you revise something shortly before you would have forgotten it.
The kind of business and economics terminology it explains
Externality
A cost or benefit of an activity that falls on someone who did not choose to be part of it, and so is not reflected in the price.
Opportunity cost
The value of the best alternative you gave up in order to do what you chose to do.
Liquidity
How quickly an asset can be turned into cash without losing much of its value.
Price elasticity of demand
How much the quantity people buy changes when the price changes, expressed as a proportion rather than an amount.
Moral hazard
When being protected from a risk makes someone more willing to take it, because they no longer bear the full consequences.
Explanations are written for your year of study and the subject you set up, so a first year and a finalist get different levels of detail for the same word.
Words that mean something specific here
Terms like capital, equity, margin and interest all have everyday meanings and technical ones. Demist explains the technical reading when it flags one, but a word that sounds ordinary is more likely to be passed over than one that is plainly technical, so it will not catch every one.
Where your lecture audio goes
In the Windows app, live recording is transcribed, and its terms detected and explained, by software running on your own machine, so the audio of a live lecture never leaves your computer. The iPhone app turns speech into text on the phone too, and sends only the words it explains, with their sentence. Your transcript and glossary sync to your account so you can see them on the web and keep your history if you reinstall.
The browser version works differently: it sends the audio to our server to be transcribed, and sends the terms it picks out to be explained. So does uploading a recording, in any version. The privacy policy sets out exactly what goes where.
What it costs
Live explanations, translation, your glossary and your flashcards are free, with no advertising. Recording is free and unlimited in the Windows and iPhone apps; in the browser, free accounts get three recordings. Free accounts keep lecture history for seven days. Demist Pro keeps your whole term, records in the browser with no limit, and adds unlimited summaries and Anki export for £4.99 a month. New accounts get Pro free for their first 30 days, with no card.
Built for students who find lectures harder to follow
Demist exists for business and economics students who are deaf or hard of hearing, who have dyslexia or ADHD, or who are studying in English as an additional language. If that is you, it is worth trying for one lecture.