For the last few days on iOS (iPhone 16) it seems like the speaking mode has been a lot worse. I use speaking mode everyday with leaning French, and I love it. Mostly these are little issues that make it less pleasant to use. here are a few of the issues I’ve noticed:
- Volume issues - the sound is very quiet and doesn’t seem to get louder by turning the volume up. The volume seems to be on a different channel than the normal audio. Previously, adjusting the volume worked as expected.
- Answering a cloze by typing deactivates the microphone on the next question.
- When auto-play of the sentence audio is activated, and you hit the “next” button while audio is playing there is an annoying “pop” noise every time. You have to wait a few seconds between when the audio stops and hitting next button to avoid this pop noise.
The above issues are new with the latest version, but here are some new feature requests for how I would love it to work:
- Voice mode could mostly work hands free - it would be nice to be able to do all my revisions by just talking when I’m getting the right answer.
- Voice mode could match alternative answers the way typing does. In French in particular, there are often transcription issues because there are lots of silent letters due to gender/number agreement and spelling reform changes. I often say the right answer, but I have to type it out anyway to add an extra
eat the end, or fix an accent mark that is already part of the set of alternative answers - I would love if I could keep talking and see the transcription. I like to try and speak the whole sentence and see if the computer can understand my pronunciation, but as soon as I get the right answer, it stops listening and transcribing (maybe a year ago it worked like this)