macOS: Spoken Content (TTS) is Limited to Full Flashcard Reading

Spoken Content is a built-in accessibility feature on Mac that allows selected text to be spoken and highlighted using a keyboard shortcut. However, I’m encountering an issue with the latest Anki version (24.06.3) on my Apple Silicon Mac. When I use the shortcut, instead of speaking the selected text, it reads the entire page. This behavior persists both before and after revealing the answer to a question. This issue doesn’t occur on iOS. A fix for this problem would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

One way to go about this is to add text-to-speech formatting to your card template.

For example:

{{tts en_US voices=Apple_Samantha,Microsoft_Zira speed=1.0:cloze:Text}}

This is already built-in with certain note types (Anking, etc.), though can be manually added to any other note type with minimal fuss. A basic tutorial can be found here:

2 Likes

Thanks, Brainravens. I tried Anki’s current Text-to-Speech feature. While it’s functional, it has some limitations. It reads the entire card instead of a selected text, lacks a pause button (pause shortcut from menu bottom right didn’t pause it for me) , and adjusting the speed affects the entire card.

In contrast, Apple’s built-in Spoken Content feature offers more granular control: it can read selected text, highlight the spoken portion [Photo], pause, adjust speed, and navigate between paragraphs. [Photo].

For flashcards with longer or multiple paragraphs, Anki’s current Text-to-Speech feature falls short. I hope a future update for the MacOS version will integrate the more robust text-to-speech of Spoken Content.

Anki is built on a cross-platform toolkit, which unfortunately doesn’t implement all platform-specific features like this. It’s possible they’ll fix it in a future update, but based on previous experience, it’s probably not going to happen soon I’m afraid.

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.