Has anyone successfully used Anki TTS cards created on Windows (with explicit {{tts voices=Microsoft_*}} directives) on an iPhone via AnkiMobile? It seems this would not be an uncommon scenario… user has Windows computer and an iPhone, then creates TTS-enabled cards on the computer, and wants to review them on the iPhone.
I have a student whose cards play voice correctly on Windows computer as expected, but are silent on iPhone (iOS), yet somehow play fine on his iPad device (iOS)
The cards use explicit voice names (e.g., Microsoft_Sabina).
I’m trying to determine whether AnkiMobile reliably falls back to iOS voices when a named voice is unavailable, or whether this can fail silently on some iPhones.
Any confirmed cross-platform experience or known limitations would be appreciated.
They can update their templates to add a service/voice that is available on that device. Field Replacements - Anki Manual
That sounds less like a TTS issue, and more like a volume-control issue. If they were using TTS that wasn’t available on the iPhone, they would get an error – not just silence.
Thank you! That was very helpful. As it turns out, the issue was solved with a hard re-boot of the mobile cell phone device.
Here’s what I found interesting… the template for the Note-type on the Windows machine had some custom TTS code to play a Microsoft-specific voice when reviewing the cards on the Windows box. I was wondering how that would be handed on the Apple phone. I suppose that the Anki mobil app simply looks for an equivalent Apple voice when playing from the iPhone? Quite honestly, I’m pleasantly surprised it worked. Per your link to the Anki help, I thought I might need to specifically code for an alternative voice if the primary one was not available. Any insights you have on how this works would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again!
I presume that if the specific service/voice isn’t available, the device relies on the language code itself, and chooses the first available voice that matches.
However that note type was specifying Windows could probably also be used to specify another device type. I expect that involves some JavaScript, because I’m not sure you can do it with something like platform-specific CSS.