Voice input reviews?

Bunpro
#1

I’ve been thinking about shaking up my review workflow a bit, but cannot figure out tooling to support that.

One part is fast voice recognition to replace typing.

I’ve found an old thread about this approach (LipSurf - Bunpro Voice Dictation. Review while you eat, do chores, etc), but it seems LipSurf Bunpro plugin is broken since 2023, and LipSurf itself is on life support.

Also I suppose in 2025 it should be possible to just run a Speech-to-Japanese model on a developer laptop instead of relying on laggy online services?

Second part that I’d try to integrate is “you are mistaking this with” feature.
It would show vocabulary corresponding to the user’s incorrect input, if any, to more easily remember the difference.

for example

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This could work with voice recognition + self-grading, or also could work with just typed input.

And finally these tools could be combined for a reading plugin.
The user would read some text, let’s say in ttsu, or in our favorite Haruna’s diary, and the tooling would follow along, underline parts that were read correctly, and provide “you’ve mistaken this with” popups.

for example

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And also mark any words currently due in SRS as reviewed.

Does anyone have pointers to existing tools for any parts of this puzzle?

5 Likes
#2

I would also love to have the option to use voice to text when doing reviews. I’m currently recovering from surgery on my hand, so my abilities to type is very limited.

I can use my Mac’s native dictation feature in Japanese, but bunpro is designed to reject answers written in Japanese. Perhaps giving an option to relax this constraints would be an easy workaround?

2 Likes
#3

I had the same exact idea last July.
Developed my own spin via a chrome extension using Claude.
Works pretty good.

Today I wanted to follow up on this and maybe open my extension up to the world and while doing so I discovered Kikoe (GitHub - mattpatterson94/kikoe: A browser extension to provide voice input and other features to wanikani and bunpro. · GitHub) which seems to be literally what we’ve been looking for.
I haven’t got time to test it though but seems way more advanced than mine and already available.

I’ll do a test for a week, I’ll let you know.

1 Like
#4

Okay quick review here.

I’ve got mixed feeling about Kikoe.
Firstly, it’s working on both Wanikani and Bunpro which is nice.
The extension gets fairly well what you say, but since my accent is not perfect both in Japanese and in English, I may have some weird result sometimes.

The only cons I can think of is that its consistently listening.
I tend to think out loud, I often try to read the whole sentence while doing my Bunpro reviews, and Kikoe interpret and input my saying which is obviously not the expected answer.
I wish it had push-to-talk as an option.

Anyway, works okay.
My version has push to talk, but is less versatile.
I’ll try to make a feature request on Kikoe.