Auto-answer from card def (without add-on)

AnkiMobile (iPhone/iPad) Help
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Hello there,

A question for everyone and in particular Damien @dae :slight_smile:

I searched online and on these forums for a while and I couldn’t find a solution, I hope this is not too trivial. Basically what I’m looking for is, for one of my Anki decks, to emulate the behavior of the Glossika app, but with my own sentence materials (from movies, tv shows, podcasts, real life conversations, etc…).

I’m using Anki Mobile so I cannot use Add-ons… so I wish there was a way to do this directly from the card definition script or else. I can handle the coding (both html and js) but I’m not sure where to start in that particular case.

The thing I’m missing is really being able to use Anki totally in hands-free mode : always answering “good” without touching the screen or using my voice — I use Glossika to speak Chinese out loud, so I cannot give orders to the phone every time a sentence is repeated.
I just need it to keep going, one sentence after another. Self-grading doesn’t really matter here, only mass sentence exposure (a few hundreds a day) and repeating out loud matters.

But obviously I still need Anki to handle the day-to-day scheduling (with some arbitrary retention setting) and of course the audio / subtitle / translation database.
Otherwise, have it behave like some kind of linear audio playlist of n sentences review every day — each one listen, repeat out loud, listen, repeat out loud… (with a n rep setting for each card, + maybe some individual playback speed setting), then move on to the next one.

Also, I’d need this behavior not to interfered with my other “regular” Anki decks, reviewing characters, vocab, etc. where self-grading is still necessary.

Otherwise, if Anki really cannot do this, could this be considered for an update of the iOS version (I assume the desktop has more options available from add-ons alone)? Or would anyone recommend some kind of alternative (even paid but non-subscription based) for iOS?

Thanks !

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Ok my bad, I search online for a long time for “auto answer”, “auto action”, “auto mark as good” etc. but I never got the idea of searching for “auto advance” (English is not my first language). I wish there was maybe a more intuitive way to find about the existence and function of this valuable option which I often encountered in Anki’s menus without knowing what it could do :sweat_smile:

So in case people wonder as I did :

  • Auto advance is a relatively “new” function (late 2023 if I’m correct?) that allows just that, to do automatic actions like answering or burying a card

  • you can set it up for a specific deck → for it to work, you need to give a non-zero value in seconds (0.1 did the trick for me), and make sure to tick the “wait for audio” option. That will answer the card only after the audio file is over.

  • last but not least, it’s not activated by default (and it seems to be explained nowhere except on reddit… :sweat_smile:), to turn it on you can either use shift + A (on desktop) or in Anki Mobile use the option under the cog → Auto Advance to toggle it on or off. As suggested by @dae in some other post, you can also assign some gesture like swipe to enable it when you start your session (there is not “auto auto-advance” function to prevent undesired reviews)

I still need to experiment with ways to have variable amounts of repeats for seperate cards (depending on difficulty or length of the audio) and maybe playback speed. But I think that’s a really good start :slight_smile:

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Checking the Anki manual directly is generally more efficient that searching the internet and wondering. Any of those searches in the manual would have led you to the Auto Advance feature. Everything you’re describing is included there – not just on reddit.

To use it, you must first set a non-zero time in Seconds to show question for and/or Seconds to show answer for . Then, in the review screen, use the Auto Advance action from the More button to start advancing.

For users of Anki desktop, there is also a❔right next to the feature in Deck Options, which opens up an explanation and links to the Anki manual.

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Yes, you are. It was add-on only before that.

To be clear, it can be enabled or disabled for a Deck Options preset group – which may or may not be a single deck.

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Thanks for the explanation.

Just to be clear, when search “auto advance” or “auto” in the Anki Manual
I only find four lines of text :

Requires Anki 23.12 or later. Auto Advance allows you to automatically take some actions after a certain amount of time has passed. To use it, you must first set a non-zero time in Seconds to show question for and/or Seconds to show answer for. Then, in the review screen, use the Auto Advance action from the More button to start advancing.

Where did you find the rest about how to toggle it on and off (desktop shortcut, action in the cog menu in Anki Mobile…)? Or was it just an educated guess? Because that’s not exactly the same thing… :sweat_smile:

Also for my defense, the description in the manual says nothing about Audio. I was probably expecting that this function only had an interest for doing something after a certain amount of time — for who knows what — but not waiting for the end of playback.

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The settings between AnkiMobile and desktop Anki are pretty consistent. That makes things easier for users who use both platforms (certainly easier than Android users have it!), and makes the main manual a good primary resource for Mobile users.

I’d expect the overall setting to be in Study Options in AnkiMobile – where the preset-specific settings from desktop Deck Options live. The study-session switch should be in the study tools :gear: – which has settings from the study-session “More” menu in desktop.

I know the docs are not always perfect, so we stay on the look-out for places they can be improved. :+1:t4:

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Yes that’s very valuable indeed ! And really justifies paying for AnkiMobile all those years ago to support the whole project :slight_smile:

Very nice thank you ! I just found that line in the Ankimobile page about Auto Advance, that’s much more explicit. “Automatically rate” instead of “grade” was the keyword I missed :slight_smile:

Allows you to automatically reveal the answer, and automatically rate or bury cards. You can customize the behaviour in the deck’s study options.

Yes I know perfectly, I’m also in charge of the quite huge documentation for some music software I develop for years (quite advanced but microscopic audience in comparison with Anki obviously) and it’s impossible to cover everything without drowning users in complexity.
Luckily there are some people to make the bridge (on youtube or even live workshops online), but as a first ressource I still have tendency to rely more on collective intelligence (i.e. stackoverflow, reddit and Anki forum) to digest a part of that complexity for me :sweat_smile:

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