AnkiBot - Telegram Bot to Record Sounds to Your Anki Collection

If you have ever used Anki for language learning, you know how important native voice recordings are.

Native voice recordings let you learn the sounds and how they correlate to written language.

Introducing Ankibot

Ankibot is a Telegram bot to let anyone remotely record pronounciations for your Anki collection.

Features:

• Ease-of-use. The Telegram bot makes it is easy to record sounds on any platform.

• Perfect for outsourcing. No need to split mp3s and work with audio manually. Just point your coach to the bot!

• Flexible api. Define which notes you want to have recorded in noteSpec.js. Specify field, deck and card type.

• MP3s. Converts all sound files to mp3 so cards run on any platform.

• Multi-note smartness. If you have the same word/sentence to be recorder on multiple notes, it will automatically add the sound to all notes.

• Performance.Asynchronous network actions means you will never be waiting for the database.

• Secure. Periodically checks if sounds are being recorded properly and saved to the Anki DB.

• Retry-possibility. Listen to your recording and do another recording right away if you are not satisfied.

• Any language or learning material. Ankibot is not tied up to a specific language or subject! Use it for whatever you need sounds for.

• Access control. To prevent abuse, you can specify which chat-ids you want to have access.

• Emojis. 🎤🌈

Set up your own AnkiBot:

You can also check out the repo here: https://github.com/larskarbo/ankibot

Create Telegram bot.

Create a new Telegram bot and retrieve the API Token. Use the @botfather bot.

Add the environment variable ANKIBOT_API_TOKEN to your .zshenv or wherever you like to have that stuff.

Add AnkiConnect to your Anki instance

In order to communicate with your Anki instance, AnkiBot uses AnkiConnect.

Follow the installation instructions for adding AnkiConnect.

Install dependencies & clone repo

To run AnkiBot, you will need Node.js, Yarn and ffmpeg.

Follow the corresponding tutorials to install those, if you don't have them already.

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/larskarbo/ankibot.git
cd ankibot

Install npm dependencies:

yarn install

Configure note specifications

In order for AnkiBot to know which cards you want to record sounds for, and which fields to fill in, you will need to populate the noteSpecs.config.js file.

I use card templates from the Fluent Forever Book and my noteSpecs.config.js file looks like this:

module.exports = [
  {
    deck: '*',
    cardType: '3. All-Purpose Card',
    textField: '- The full sentence (no words blanked out)',
    soundField: '- Extra Info (Pronunciation, personal connections, conjugations, etc)',
  },
  {
    deck: '*',
    cardType: '2. Picture Words',
    textField: 'Word',
    soundField: 'Pronunciation (Recording and/or IPA)',
  },
]

The field properties refer to which field that contains text and the sound file. deck is set to wildcard (*) and cardType refers to the card type I am using (the normal is basic).

Run it!

Make sure Anki is open, then run the script:

yarn start

Now go to your bot in Telegram and start recording by writing /start.

I would love to hear if you have any issues or unexpected problems.