Guide · Updated August 2026

Anki while driving? Here’s the audio-only alternative.

You can’t use Anki while driving — it has no audio-only mode, no background playback, and no voice input, so every card needs your eyes and thumbs. If you want real spaced repetition in the car, you need an app built to run by voice. For Japanese vocabulary, that app exists and it’s free: Kotoba speaks each prompt, hears your answer, grades it, and schedules the next review — hands-free from start to finish.

Can you use Anki while driving?

Not really, and it’s not for lack of people trying. Anki reviews are built around a loop of read the card → recall → flip → tap a grade. Every step assumes a screen and a free hand. Lock your phone or switch apps and the session simply stops — there is no background mode. The requests are easy to find and years old: an open Anki forum thread asking for background playback with the screen off, another asking to play card audio like a playlist, and an AnkiDroid issue requesting voice-control support that has been open since roughly 2019. None have shipped.

The workarounds people try

Each of these comes up in the forums, and each gives up the thing that makes Anki work:

• Exporting card audio to a playlist. You get sound, but it plays every card in a fixed order whether you know the word or not. No recall attempt, no grading, no scheduling — it’s a podcast with extra steps.
• Text-to-speech add-ons. The add-ons that attempted eyes-free review are abandoned, and even when they worked they still needed a tap to grade and flip each card.
• AnkiDroid gesture taps. Blind-tapping regions of a screen you’re not supposed to be looking at, while driving, defeats the purpose entirely.
• “I just do my reps at red lights.” This one shows up more often than it should. Please don’t.

The common thread: Anki’s scheduling is excellent, but its interface is fundamentally visual. Retrofitting audio onto it loses the active recall that makes spaced repetition worth doing.

What a hands-free SRS actually needs

To keep the memory science and lose the screen, the whole review loop has to move to audio. That means four things: the app speaks the prompt (“apple… in Japanese?”), it listens to your spoken answer, it grades what it heard with speech recognition rather than asking you to tap, and it schedules the next review with a real SRS algorithm. Mid-session controls — repeat, skip, pause — have to be voice commands too. That’s a different product, not an Anki add-on.

Kotoba: audio-only spaced repetition for Japanese

Disclosure: this page is by the developer of Kotoba — the app below is mine.

I built Kotoba because I wanted exactly this and it didn’t exist: a spaced-repetition vocabulary trainer that runs entirely by ear. You dash-mount your phone (or just use AirPods or car audio), tap Start once, and that’s the last tap. Kotoba teaches each new word with a slow spoken breakdown, quizzes you days later right before you’d forget it, hears your answer, and grades it with cloud speech recognition. Scheduling uses FSRS — the same modern algorithm recent Anki versions offer — so your reviews behave the way an Anki deck would.

• Free, no ads, no subscription — it’s a web app (PWA), no app store needed
• JLPT N5–N3 vocabulary: nearly 3,000 words, 40,000+ native-quality audio clips, every word taught in a natural example sentence
• Voice commands for everything mid-session: “repeat”, “skip”, “pause”, “got it”
• Works offline once cached — cell dead zones included

The honest limits: it’s Japanese-only, it’s vocabulary (not grammar lectures), and speech recognition needs a signal — when it drops, Kotoba degrades to spoken self-grading instead of stalling. If you’re learning Japanese and your Anki reviews keep losing to your commute, this is the tool for that hour.

Frequently asked questions