[piazz]

I’m working on an Anki Addon that streamlines the hell out of the card generation process using LLMs. You can define a schema of prompts for your note type & fields, where each prompt can reference other fields, and use it to generate things like translations, example sentences, mnemonics, for tens of thousands of cards in batches or in the fly as they’re reviewed. These generated fields can reference other generated fields so it’s actually a fully fledged DAG under the hood! It also supports TTS in 50+ languages. Soon adding image generation support.

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1531888719

It’s a paid service at $5/mo with a free trial. Just cracked $50/MRR! Baby steps, but the value is clearly there. Need to tighten up a couple things, especially the web presence and onboarding, before I start marketing more. The tragic irony is that I’m spending all my language learning time building this (alas there can be no other way).

[imtringued]

I'm not sure if you care, but one of my biggest issues with Anki is that in theory there should be high quality official vocabulary decks and if you want to make a custom deck, all you really should have to do is select the words you want in your deck.

One of the worst parts about learning vocabulary with Anki isn't with the spaced repetition but rather the mechanism that adds new cards to your pool of "learning" cards. You might be grinding 10 to 30 words per day, but the ones you actually need are so far spaced out that 90% of the time is being wasted with poor retention, because you don't know or care about the context those words are used in. This means learning a language is an X year slog that you must get through "all or nothing" instead of being milestone driven.

Anki needs to become vocabulary aware so that you learn words and concepts instead of cards. Then an LLM driven add-on could automatically filter down the base deck based on whether the word is relevant to the PDF or picture you provide.

Most language learning tools are crap because they don't adapt to your particular goals and needs. I have personally built something similar that takes a video and just cuts out the subtitles, a thumbnail/snapshot and the audio track to generate anki decks of a video file and since it only takes a month at most to get through the entire deck, most of the pain is actually in finding novel video files rather than using Anki.

[josters]

This is really nice! I couldn’t find it in your feature set and maybe it is there, but I am looking for a way to do Anki card reviews without looking at the screen.

The other day I was on a 6h solo road trip and thought how useful it would have been if I could just open Anki on my phone and do my daily reviews without direct interaction. With a combination of TTS/STT and some background noise reduction this would be a neat feature: card appears, word/sentence is spoken, I have 60s for a response which is evaluated and automatically rated, then repeat. Maybe also find a way to keep the screen black to prevent distraction.

[piazz]

That would be really cool. Unfortunately there's not much you can do on mobile with Anki extensions, so what you've described would have to be a standalone app. You could definitely wire up TTS fields with this add-on, but you'd still have to manually rate your answer.

[herunan]

I was wondering why this wasn’t a thing yet. And here it is!

[piazz]

Same! There was another add-on that sort of did it, but it was broken with modern versions of Anki. Was very surprised nobody built this yet.

[john_minsk]

This is amazing.