According to the Shortcut Hotkeys:
alt+Space Record audio (for speaking)
The problem is that in pretty much any browser (certainly in Chrome, Firefox and Edge) Alt+Space activates the standard Move / Size / Close Window menu. Consequently it never works to trigger the record button, and the only way to trigger it is by mouse.
Personally I try to avoid using the mouse as much as possible.
Could this be changed to a keyboard shortcut that works?
Thanks.
alt+space record audio for speaking definitely needs to be working. For players who are heavily using the speaking option the mouse becomes non-user-friendly after some time.
I’ve only just discovered this “Speaking” option - noticed it a few times before when doing reviews, but since I tend to do those in the middle of the night, I’ve never felt comfortable to try it out then, always intending to make some time for it during the day, and then forgetting about it.
So glad to have discovered the alt+space record shortcut, since indeed, I prefer never to use the mouse for anything if I can avoid it.
Did have to switch browsers to Chrome for it to work, but so far completely loving it!
I was just trying to find some extra information on how it’s supposed to work, and am so glad to have come across this shortcut key combination, so many thanks to both of you!
I don’t know whether you’re on a Mac perhaps, but certainly in Windows Alt+Space in Chrome still brings up the window menu for me… as indeed is should since that’s a standard command which needs to be there in case there are issues with the mouse.
However I’ve been dabbling in this mode again today and noticed that the keyboard shortcut for recording speech has been changed to Ctrl+Enter. This is rather good since you can flip between that and Ctrl+Space to play back should you need to. (In Italian this is usually when the gender or count of the cloze is not obvious.)
Speaking mode is an odd one. I’ve never been able to figure out why it’s available on some of my machines and not others despite the presence of microphones and (as far as I know) the same permissions on both.
It’s really easy to get into the top 10 on the leaderboard because as far as I can see… pretty much nobody uses it, so there aren’t even 10 people ON the leaderboard for English → Italian for this week. (There are 10 for the month but the 10th placed one has done only 21 questions. @sindaco is far and away the biggest user of it in everything from month to all time, being the only one with a significant number of sentences done. )
It’s a lot slower than typing, and sometimes does some really weird things. (For example the cloze was “girare” in one sentence. I said “girare”, I saw “girare” just under the record button, but… nothing happened. I looked up and it had changed the recorded word from girare to “cerare”. You WHAT???) But since I love SPEAKING the language, and since I was looking for something more entertaining to try to FINALLY clear those 9 thousand-something FFT reviews that I still have hanging around, it can be an interesting change.
This will be the reason why indeed. How I do miss all the shortcut key combinations in Windows and being able to navigate application menus without the need for a mouse. I still know so many of them by heart (e.g. for doing various things in Word).
This is interesting, I’ve been offline for some days, so haven’t noticed this as of yet. I’ll have to check in a bit, but it does seem like a useful change indeed.
I’ll take your word for this 
The last time I looked at any of the leaderboards (which might well be around 4 months ago), I did find that very few people made use of some of these kinds of modes indeed.
Yes, while I get that some words are harder to detect than others, and it can be immensely frustrating if you’ve said it correctly 5-6 times in a row and it’s still not getting it, the ones that I really don’t get, are indeed the ones where it did initially detect it correctly, and then it decides to change it for some odd reason.
Exactly, I’ve been trying to clear the thousands of reviews I’ve built up, by having initially set my 100 % Mastered review dates too optimistically, and it is a nice way of trying to clear at least some of them. I like that you can say the whole sentence out loud, and it will still generally detect the required cloze correctly. I feel like it really embraces the “learning words in the context of every day sentences/usage” approach, by saying the whole sentence out loud, rather than just a word here or there, even if it is quite a bit slower overall.
Thanks a lot… wondered a long time, why it disappeared on most devices i use. Just remembered while reading this that it works in chrome but not in Firefox. Shame that it’s non existent in the Android App.