Hi all. I have been using Anki for a few months, and I have really come to love it. Now I am investigating whether to use it for memorizing text (Bible passages in my case) rather than a different program I am using, and I would like advice on setting up the design of the card and the app preferences for optimum use. Note that I always use iOS (both iPad or iPhone depending on where I am) for study, and I always use desktop (Mac) for adding/managing cards.
The idea is that I would see a reference (card front), I would quote the text out loud, and then I would read the text (card back) to see whether I quoted it correctly. I see doing this in two scenarios:
I study with the help of a partner who would be the one operating Anki on the iPad. The partner would tell me the reference and click through to the card back, following along with the text on the card back as I quote. The partner could tell me the anything I may have misquoted.
I study by myself, using the “record voice” feature, where I see the card front, record myself quoting the verse, and then reveal the text and listen to my recording to confirm that I quoted correctly.
The reason I am asking for advice is for the case where I need to record my voice, because so far it is a rather clunky experience in my tests. For example:
The front of the card is displayed, showing only the reference.
Tap once to activate “Record Voice.” Then tap again to select “Record Voice” that pops up.
Record my voice quoting the passage and then tap “Finish.”
Then my recording automatically plays back again, which is not helpful while still on the card front. I have to tap cancel.
Advance to the back of the card, revealing the text.
Tap once to activate “Record Voice,” then tap again to select “Replay Voice.”
Quickly tap cancel so that the record voice menu goes away, because on iPhone it covers a large portion of the answer that I need to compare my recording against.
There are more taps than are necessary. Perhaps there are some alternative approaches the people could suggest. The ideal process in my imagination would be the following:
The front of the card is displayed, showing only the reference.
Tap once to activate “Record Voice.” [Recording would begin then]
Record my voice and then tap “Finish.” [Recording would not autoplay at this point]
Advance to the back of the card, revealing the text. [Recording would begin autoplaying at this point, or else I should have a one-tap solution for playback without covering the answer.]
Do you have suggestions for how I configure the card and/or Anki settings, or are there opportunities here for improving the app?
I have been practicing the workflow for a couple of days, and I think I can now condense it down to a single suggestion for improvement of the iOS app with regard to playback of voice recording.
Currently, when “Replay Voice” is activated, whether the automatic playback immediately after recording or after tapping “Replay Voice,” the voice recording popup menu (by which I mean the menu with “Record Voice,” Replay Voice,” “Replay Card,” and “Cancel” — I can make a screenshot if it is unclear) pops up again.
My suggestion: don’t pop it up again upon replay. I think is perfectly fine if the voice is played back automatically after recording is finished, but if so, there is no need to pop up the menu again in most scenarios. It really is just in the way, when I need to quickly advance to the back of the card to compare my recorded voice against the right answer, and the popup gets in the way of that process by requiring extra taps. It is more of a hindrance on iPhone than iPad, as the popup menu covers a large part of the tap area and likely covers up important parts of the card.
That one change would clean up the experience nicely, but if you don’t mind, let me make this bonus suggestion: presently, one can assign “Record Voice” as a tap action, but it brings up the popup menu I described. Instead, I suggest changing it (or adding an additional action) to begin recording the voice, same as selecting “Record Voice” in the popup, and also adding “Replay Voice” as a tap action. That would further streamline the experience.
Thanks for the feedback, I’ve made a note to look into it. The original use case this was designed for was language learners comparing their voice to a pre-recorded one.
Thank you for working on this. I ended up following the routine that I was experimenting with when I started this thread, so a little improvement would be welcome.
As for testing, I will be happy to do it if you think it would be helpful to you to have my feedback.
I have been testing the iOS beta for two or three days. The addition of the record voice (not menu) tap action perfectly streamlines the flow I was talking about in this thread, all without changing the previous behavior for those to whom it is more useful. That is a good approach.
Besides that, although this beta is still said to be “rough,” so far I have not observed any issue at all, although I have not been using the new scheduler or really testing out any of the other functionality. For me, I do all of my adding and managing of cards on desktop and use for both iPhone and iPad for review (whether in a comfy chair or while excercising, for example).