Background Tasks and Notifications

Some of Scholarly's AI creations take a few minutes — video lectures, podcasts, slide decks, deep research reports, and large flashcard decks all involve real work behind the scenes. You don't have to watch the spinner. Close the window, switch to another task, even leave the site — Scholarly keeps generating in the background and lets you know when each item is ready.

What Runs in the Background

These creations keep running after you close the create window:

• AI Flashcards — large decks generated from PDFs, audio, or research.
• AI Podcasts — script writing + multi-voice audio.
• AI Video Lectures — script, animation, narration, captions.
• AI Slides — full PDF slide deck with layout checks.
• Deep Research — multi-step web research with citations.
• AI Meeting Notes — transcription after upload or live capture.
• Pages — a full drafted page written from your sources.
• Text-to-Speech — a document read aloud and saved as a single MP3.
• Transcribe — an audio file, video, or YouTube video turned into a downloadable transcript.
• Typeset PDF documents — study guides, worksheets, timelines, SOPs, flowcharts, lesson plans, outlines, story books, mind maps, and infographics.
• AI Spreadsheets and AI Documents — structured tables, and every document format the AI Document Creator builds.

Every one of them opens a live progress page the moment you start it, showing the step it is on, how long it has been running, and how long that kind of creation usually takes. You can leave it immediately — see Following a Creation While It Runs.

Anything still generating also sits in the In progress group at the top of your Recent list on Home. Click any row to jump back to its progress page.

Starting a Task and Walking Away

The pattern is the same across every creation flow:

1. Open the create window for the feature you want.
2. Pick your source material and customize the settings.
3. Click Create (or Generate) — the task starts.
4. Close the window (the X in the corner) or navigate anywhere else in the app.
5. Carry on with whatever else you wanted to do.

The task runs to completion on its own. Closing the window doesn't cancel it — to stop one deliberately, open its progress page and choose Cancel generation, where that creation supports it.

This holds for documents too: study guides, slides, worksheets, reports, and the rest keep generating even if you leave the page. And if a generation is interrupted part-way through, Scholarly picks it back up with your sources still in place instead of throwing the run away and starting over.

You can also start a task later instead of now — see Scheduled Tasks. Scheduled tasks wait in their own section on Home, next to the ones already running.

How You Know When It's Done

You'll see the completion two ways:

• In-app — the task row on the home page flips from "Processing" to "Ready," and the new item appears at the top of your Recents. The sidebar shows recently completed items too.
• By email — Scholarly emails you when a long-running creation finishes (podcasts, video lectures, study guides, PDFs, slides, research, and the rest). One toggle in Settings → Notifications turns every creation-ready email on or off. Source processing — parsing an uploaded PDF, transcribing meeting notes — does not send an email.

Email is most useful for video lectures and long podcasts, which can take 10–25 minutes. You can turn it off if you only watch the home-page task strip.

A background creation keeps the title you were given: the same name shows up in project lists and in the email that tells you it's ready, rather than a generic label.

Podcasts do not always make you wait for the whole episode. On an episode with more than one chapter, chapter 1 becomes playable while the rest is still recording; when the full episode is ready, playback switches over and keeps your place.

Cancelling a Task

Most creations can be stopped while they run. Open the task's progress page and choose Cancel generation; you'll be asked to confirm, because anything generated so far is discarded. Cancelled work is labelled as cancelled rather than failed.

If a Task Fails

When a creation fails, the row on Home says what went wrong in plain terms — content that could not be used, a source that could not be read, a source that was too large, not enough content to work from, or a step that broke part-way — and offers only the fixes that apply to that failure:

• Try again — re-run with the same settings.
• Try another model — re-run on a different AI model, within what your plan includes.
• Pick fewer pages — narrow a long PDF to a page range.
• Replace the source or Adjust the sources — swap out a source that was deleted or archived, or open a PDF or video that has not finished processing and try again once it has.

A bare Try again is not offered when the cause lives in the source, because an identical second run would fail the same way.

Failed creations do not count against your AI Creation Credit allowance — Scholarly reserves usage when work starts and returns it automatically once the task reaches a final failed state.

If it keeps failing on the same source, that source is the likely culprit; try the creation with it removed. For every reason and what it means, see When a Creation Fails. If you're stuck, see Feedback and Bug Reports.

Multiple Tasks at Once

You can run several background tasks side by side. Start a video lecture, kick off a podcast, queue a research report — all three generate at the same time and appear separately on the home page. The only hard cap is your AI Creation Credit allowance (see Plans and Limits).

Tips

• Treat the home page as a control tower. Glance at the background tasks strip when you come back — finished items wait at the top, in-progress ones show their stage.
• Pin a task as soon as it's done. That keeps it from getting buried as you create more.
• Don't worry about your battery or browser. Generation happens on Scholarly's servers, not your device. Close the laptop and the task still finishes.

Related

• Following a Creation While It Runs — the live progress page, agent activity, and cancelling.
• When a Creation Fails — every failure reason and the recovery action that matches it.
• Scheduled Tasks — starting a creation at a chosen day and time.
• Home and Library — where background tasks appear on home.
• Plans and Limits — your shared AI Creation Credit allowance.
• Feedback and Bug Reports — what to do when a task keeps failing.