Demist for psychology students
Psychology uses ordinary words in precise technical senses, and a lecturer rarely stops to flag which sense they mean. The statistics half of the degree then adds a second vocabulary on top.
What it does during a psychology 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 psychology terminology it explains
Effect size
A measure of how large a difference or relationship is, independent of sample size, which a p-value on its own does not tell you.
Demand characteristics
Cues in a study that let participants guess its purpose, so they change their behaviour to match what they think is expected.
Operationalisation
Defining an abstract concept, such as anxiety, as something specific and measurable, such as a score on a named scale.
Confound
A variable that varies alongside the one you are studying, so you cannot tell which of the two produced the result.
Ecological validity
How well a finding obtained under study conditions holds up in the everyday settings it is meant to describe.
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.
Terms you already know are left alone
Psychology is full of everyday words used technically. Demist only flags terms it judges you are unlikely to know at your year of study, and will not interrupt a lecture to define "memory" or "behaviour".
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 psychology 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.