This is a third-party script/app and is not created by the WaniKani team. By using this, you understand that it can stop working at any time or be discontinued indefinitely.
A year ago two things happened: I started getting finger/wrist pain from all the typing I was doing (eg. with WaniKani) and I realized there were many times I wanted to do WaniKani reviews but I didn’t have both hands free…
“No problem!” I thought, and started writing a script to let me use voice dictation for my reviews.
I finished writing the script, wiped my brow and looked at the clock.
It was 2am… near the end of 2018.
And here we are today! I became a bit obsessed with the script and now it’s a very polished, customizeable and fully extensible Chrome extension that let’s you do anything with your voice (WaniKani reviews & lessons, browse reddit, scroll pages, click links, play videos, etc… you betcha)
It has benefits:
- Practice speaking your reviews (you should be speaking them outloud anyway!)
- Those ふ, る, and く’s can be really challenging for native English speakers especially, practice and master them.
- Reviews can be faster once you get the hang of it
- Less hand/wrist pain and chance for injury
- Do reviews while you do other stuff (eg. eating, knitting, chores etc.)
As any developer knows too well, a free software tool eventually comes to a crossroad where it will 1. either die because nobody wants to support it anymore or 2. you exchange it for money and thus are incentivized to keep it alive and thriving.
I went with 2. It’s no longer free, and I hope people understand why and will support me. You can still use it for free forever, just not all the features.
Here’s a video guide:
Duolingo support is now here (for Japanese and Spanish)!
Kitsun.io and Bunpro Early Support is Now Here!
General Usage
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Install the extension
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lipsurf/lnnmjmalakahagblkkcnjkoaihlfglon -
(optional) install the lightning mode user script so you don’t have to say “next” or “次” all the time.
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Do the tutorial for LipSurf (there’s even a special section for WaniKani)
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Go to the options and choose your primary English dialect (Australia, UK… etc.)
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Make sure LipSurf is activated (click to toggle it on/off from the chrome extension toolbar, or just say the wake-word “hey LipSurf” if you have Premium)
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Say “crocodile crab” or “wanikani” to go to wanikani.com
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Speak your reviews in the appropriate language (Japanese for readings, otherwise some dialect of English)
- Only the correct answer will get filled in… to prevent speech recognizer mis-hearings
- Say “wrong” or “だめ” when you don’t know the answer (you have to manually mark any wrong answers)
- (NEW in v1.8) click the live text (transcript) to make a correction or a custom synonym.
- After 3 wrong answers (3 speech utterances) you will see the answer in the textbox, at this point you can decide whether you were right or wrong and say the appropriate command.
- Say “correct” or “正しい” to manually mark a work as correct, if the speech recognizer is having trouble
- (NEW in v0.5) say “えいご” to switch to English if in Japanese/reading mode and then you can spell out kana as you would on the keyboard. (eg. for しょうがつ just say s-h-o-u-g-a-t-s-u) and the answer will be inputted only if it’s correct. Super helpful for the short one-syllable kanji that recognition has trouble with, especially.
- Say “info” or “じょうほう” to simulate clicking the info button for the current item
- You can also spell out English words for meaning items
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Consider supporting the project! I really need support to keep the thing maintained and improving. I would also super appreciate reviews in the chrome webstore, if you can’t back the project in any other way but you think it’s cool.
Here’s the site that has more details:
Updates:
Relevant recent updates:
8/3/2023 – Rewritten to work with the latest version of WaniKani
1/26/2023 – Now working on “extra study” lessons
10/12/2021 – fixes to showing hints, and new “show hint”/“ヒント” command
6/30/2021 – v4 makes pausing LipSurf during audio pronunciation (to prevent feedback) an option (by default on)
1/25/2021 – New Bunpro, KaniWani and Kitsun.io plugins, thanks @okonomichiyaki!
Will most likely get pro then. I’ve tried other programs like this but they didn’t work as well as this seems to do. Especially not Window’s native assistants, haha.
