Speech to Text Extension for Inputting Wanikani Answers?

[HannyBiggs]

Hello everyboday!

I’ve been on the hunt for some sort of extension that can type spoken Japanese (from a mic) into hiragana. What I’d like to do is use it to input the answers for Wanikani (so instead of typing in the hiragana for kanji, I can say it out loud and the extension will do the typing for me). I feel like speaking the answers will form a better “brain connection” than just typing them in and will also help me keep my pronunciation sharp

I’ve tried to do this via my iPhone speech to text, but it automatically outputs the text in kanji, which doesn’t work well for submitting WaniKani answers and from what I’ve read there’s no way to change it to outputting hiragana.

I’m happy to do this on my phone or computer, I use both to study. But I figure there’s a better chance that there’s some sort of chrome extension that might do something like this that works for the WaniKani site?

Bonus points if its free or one-off payment (I’ve got enough subscriptions ), and of course happy to donate to the cause.

TLDR: Anyone know of any speech to text extension for chrome that can be used for WaniKani (and gives you the option to output as hiragana, NOT kanji?)

Thank you in advance for your help here!

[Sinyaven]

I don’t know if they are still working, but here are two suggestions:

LipSurf - WaniKani Voice Dictation. Review while you eat, do chores, etc

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 …

[Userscript] Voice Input using Web Speech API

Voice Input using Web Speech API This is a userscript which enables you to do reviews and lessons hands-free using dictation. It relies on the Web Speech API which only works in some browsers. I’ve only tested it in Google Chrome, and it may not work in other browsers. I’ve been using this for a few months now, but it’s not perfect and likely has some bugs. If you run into issues, please let me know here. I hope someone finds it useful. Features dictate in English for meanings and in Japanese…

[HannyBiggs]

Aaah fantastic! Thanks so much for this. I’m going to give them a go and report back if they work or not haha.
Thanks again

[HannyBiggs]

Alrighty, reporting back here for anyone who might see it later on.

1. They both still work! But there are some pros and cons between using the two of them. I’ll break them down below.
2. LipSurf (the first option) - More polished and functionalities outside of just WaniKani use. There are some free functionalities, but WaniKani usage is specifically outside of that umbrella. You have to pay a subscription of aroud 3-4 euro a month. As mentioned in the original post, I’m not looking to add another subscription to the list so I stopped looking further here… A shame because I would have been happy to pay for it one off.
3. Voice Input using Web Speech API (the second option) - This is what I’m going with for now! It’s free to use which is nice and works well enough. It’s not 100% bulletproof with its interpretations and a lot of times you’ll have to repeat yourself, but I suppose that’s just good reinforcement haha. It won’t pick up shorter phrases for kanji all that well from what I’ve seen so far. The only other con I can see is that it doesn’t seem to type out the answer if it is incorrect. I haven’t looked at the settings to understand if there’s a way to change this, but if you use it as it is “out of the box,” then you’ll be unfairly skewed towards a higher percentage of “right” answers (which isn’t great if you do need the extra work on some trouble spots).

Thanks again @Sinyaven for the help here!