Use case · Students
Stop trying to take perfect notes.
Record the lecture. Listen properly. Bonfiyah turns the audio into a searchable transcript with the professor's voice separated from the students', and Pro AI generates study notes that distill the structure of the lecture so you can review what mattered.
The trade-off you've been making
When you take notes, you're doing two things at once — listening to follow the argument, and writing to capture it. You can't do both at full attention. Most students compromise by writing more (and listening less) when the material is hard, which is exactly the wrong way around.
Bonfiyah lets you collapse the trade-off: listen at full attention, capture nothing during the lecture, and let the recording produce the structured notes afterward.
Is this allowed?
Recording lectures for personal use is permitted in most U.S. universities and required for accommodations students under ADA. Many professors explicitly welcome it; some require advance notice; a small number prohibit it. Check your syllabus and your institution's policy. Bonfiyah's consent module surfaces the relevant state law before each recording, but classroom policy is its own layer.
What you get from Pro
- Auto-transcript with the professor labeled as "Professor" and other voices labeled as "Student 1, Student 2…" by default — relabel when you recognize voices
- Search across every lecture in your library — "find the lecture where she explained Bayesian priors"
- Bookmarks from the live recording — tap once on the lock screen to mark a moment as important
- Highlight and export — pull the parts you care about into a study guide
What Pro AI adds for studying
- Lecture outline — automatically extracted structure: section headers, subsections, transitions
- Defined-term glossary — every term the professor introduced, in the order introduced, with the definition they gave
- Concept connections — Story Mode-derived "the lecture moved from X to Y to Z because of W" arc summary
- Pre-Brief before each next lecture — what concepts from the prior lecture are likely to recur
- Question prompts for office hours — generated from places in your transcript where you were probably confused
Everything runs on your iPhone. Audio doesn't leave the device. The recordings are not used to train any AI.
A practical workflow
- Tap the Bonfiyah complication on your Apple Watch as you sit down. Recording starts in under a second.
- Listen. Tap the bookmark glyph on your phone or watch when something matters.
- Tap stop when the lecture ends. Walk to your next class.
- Bonfiyah transcribes during the walk. By the time you sit down, the transcript is ready.
- That evening, open the lecture, scan the AI-generated outline, expand the sections that were unclear, listen to the audio at the bookmarks.
- Pro AI's study-note view becomes your study guide for the exam.
Common student questions
Will recording for 90 minutes drain my battery?
A 90-minute recording with the screen off uses ~6-8% of an iPhone 14 battery. Less than a TikTok scroll session.
What about classes where the prof writes a lot on the board?
Bonfiyah doesn't capture the board. We recommend snapping a photo at the end and attaching it to the recording (Settings → Recording → Attach Image). The transcript + image together cover both modalities.
Can I share lecture transcripts with classmates?
Yes — share via standard iOS share sheet. Be aware that some institutions consider lecture content the intellectual property of the professor, and broad redistribution may violate policy. Personal study group sharing is generally fine; posting transcripts publicly usually isn't.
Student discount?
Bonfiyah Pro is $9.99/mo without a discount, and $79.99/year if you pay annually — the annual price comes out to $6.67/mo, which is the de-facto student price for the cohort that uses it most. We don't gate the .edu signup behind a separate process.
Get the student playbook
A short PDF on how to set up Bonfiyah for the semester, what to record, what to skip, and how to use the AI study-note view to actually retain material — not just have it.
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