Short answer: Anki has no dictation of its own, but a system-wide voice tool like Voice Keyboard Pro types spoken text into the Add window. Click the Front field, hold the hotkey, speak the prompt; Tab to the Back, speak the answer; press the shortcut to add. It turns card-making from a typing chore into a spoken loop.
The dirty secret of spaced repetition is that most people quit before the reviews ever pay off, and the reason is card creation. Making good Anki cards is slow. You read something, decide it is worth remembering, then stop and type out a front and a back, click into fields, format, add. The review is the easy part; the making is the grind. Anything that lowers the cost of turning a fact into a card means more cards get made, and more cards made is the whole game.
Anki has no microphone button. It is a desktop app for Mac (and Windows and Linux), plus AnkiMobile on iPhone and iPad, and none of them ship voice input for the fields you type into. But you do not need Anki to add dictation. You add it to the operating system, so your voice can type into any field, including the Front and Back boxes of the Add window. This guide covers the setup on both Mac and iPhone, a batch workflow that makes card creation genuinely fast, and how voice turns building a language deck into something you can do out loud.
Why Anki has no built-in dictation
Anki is, at heart, a database of text notes with a scheduling algorithm on top. The desktop app assumes you type your cards, the same way a spreadsheet assumes you type your cells. There is no built-in mic because dictation on a Mac is best solved once, globally, rather than rebuilt inside every app you touch.
That is exactly why a system-wide voice tool fits here. Instead of waiting for Anki to add voice support, you add one dictation layer to your Mac or iPhone and it works in the Add window, in the browse editor, in the deck rename box, and in every other app on the machine. The approach is the same one people use to dictate notes in Notability or GoodNotes; the cursor is the cursor, whatever app it happens to be blinking in.
Setting up dictation for Anki on Mac
- Install a system-wide dictation tool. Voice Keyboard Pro lives in the menu bar and inserts text at the cursor in any Mac app. Grant microphone and accessibility permission on first launch.
- Open Anki and click Add (or press the shortcut for it) to open the note editor.
- Click into the Front field so the cursor is blinking there.
- Hold the hotkey, speak your prompt, release. The text lands in the Front box.
- Press Tab to jump to the Back field, hold the hotkey again, and speak the answer.
- Add the card with the keyboard shortcut and the fields clear for the next one.
Notice the rhythm: click, speak, Tab, speak, add. Your hands barely move, and the slow part, forming the actual sentence of a prompt or an answer, happens at speaking speed instead of typing speed. For a deck of a hundred cards that difference is the difference between a chore you abandon and a habit you keep.
The batch workflow: read first, card later
The biggest speed gain is not per-card; it is in how you sequence the work. Do not stop to make a card the instant you hit a fact worth keeping. That constant context-switch between reading and formatting is what makes card creation feel miserable. Instead, split the job into two passes.
Pass one: read and mark. Go through your source material, be it a textbook, a lecture, an article, and just highlight or jot the facts you want to turn into cards. Stay in reading mode. Do not open Anki.
Pass two: dictate the deck. Open the Add window, and go down your marked list turning each one into a card by voice. Front, Tab, Back, add. Because you are now in a single mode, working through your list, the cards fly. Ten marked facts become ten cards in a couple of minutes because you are only ever doing one thing: speaking the next field.
The reason people make bad, sparse decks is that typing each card interrupts their reading. Separate the two, and dictate the second pass, and both halves get faster.
This two-pass habit is the same one that makes voice work well for people capturing lots of small items quickly, whether that is students building study decks or anyone drafting a pile of short notes. Our guide to voice to text for students covers the study-session version of this in more detail.
Speaking punctuation and formatting
Dictation inserts punctuation when you say it out loud, which is exactly what you want for card content. Say "question mark" to end a prompt with ?, "comma" and "period" where they belong, "colon" before a definition, and "new line" if you want the back of a card to break across lines. For a cloze-style card you will still type the {{c1::...}} markers yourself, because those are syntax, not prose; dictate the sentence, then reach for the keyboard to wrap the word you are deleting. The rule of thumb is the same one that applies anywhere you mix voice with structured text: speak the language, type the markup.
Building a language deck by voice
Language learners are the heaviest Anki users, and voice has a special payoff for them. If you are learning vocabulary, the front of a card is often a word or phrase in your target language and the back is your native-language meaning, or the reverse. Typing accented characters and non-Latin scripts is exactly the kind of fiddly keyboard work that slows deck-building to a crawl.
On the iPhone, the Voice Keyboard Pro keyboard includes two-way translation across 24 languages while you dictate. That means you can speak a phrase in one language and have the translation typed out, which is a natural fit for building bilingual cards: dictate the target-language side, and use translation to generate the meaning side, or vice versa. You are producing both halves of a vocabulary card with your voice instead of hunting for special characters on a keyboard. For learners who study across languages all day, this pairs well with the broader setup in our post on multilingual voice typing on Mac.
A caution worth stating: pronunciation matters when you dictate in a language you are still learning, and the transcription reflects what you actually said. That is not entirely a downside. A card whose front only comes out right when you pronounce it right is quietly training your pronunciation too.
Teach it your subject's vocabulary
Medical students, law students, and anyone studying a jargon-heavy field hit the same wall: a general dictionary does not know their terms. Drug names, anatomical structures, case names, biochemical pathways, statute numbers, all of it gets mangled if the tool has never seen it, and re-correcting the same word on every card defeats the purpose of dictating.
Voice Keyboard Pro's Smart Vocabulary solves this. It is a personal dictionary with replacement rules, so you teach it your field's recurring terms once and they come out spelled and capitalized correctly from then on. A med student can load in the drug names they are memorizing; a law student can load the case citations. Every card after that lands clean. This is the single biggest quality-of-life upgrade for anyone building technical decks, because it turns the terms that used to need constant fixing into terms the tool already knows.
Making cards on your iPhone
A lot of Anki reviewing happens on the phone during dead time, and a lot of good card ideas arrive there too. AnkiMobile on iPhone lets you add notes, and the Voice Keyboard Pro iPhone keyboard has a built-in mic button that works in any iOS app, so you can dictate the Front and Back right in the AnkiMobile editor while standing in a line. It also includes Voice Edit, where you speak a correction to fix text you just dictated without retyping it, which is handy when the back of a card comes out slightly off and you want to fix one phrase. Between translation for language decks and voice input for everything else, card creation stops being tethered to your desk.
A note on Anki's own audio field
Anki can attach recorded audio to a card, which is a different feature and worth not confusing with dictation. That audio is a sound file you play back during review; it is not searchable, editable, or usable as the text of a prompt. Dictation, by contrast, produces actual text in the field, text you can search in the browser, edit later, format, and study as a written prompt. For most cards you want text, and dictation is how you get text into the field without typing it. Recorded audio is a nice addition for pronunciation cards, but it does not replace having the words written down.
Privacy note
If your decks contain sensitive material, exam prep tied to your program, or notes from confidential coursework, it is fair to ask what leaves your machine. Voice Keyboard Pro's server stores only operational pings; it does not store your audio or the content of what you transcribe. Your dictated cards live in your Anki collection, synced through your own AnkiWeb account, not in any transcript held by the dictation tool.
The bottom line
Anki rewards you for making lots of good cards, and punishes you with tedium for making them by keyboard. Adding a system-wide voice layer flips that. Read first, mark what matters, then dictate the whole batch: Front, Tab, Back, add, again and again at speaking speed. Teach the tool your field's vocabulary so the terms land clean, and on the iPhone lean on translation to build language decks without fighting a keyboard. The reviews were always the easy part. This finally makes the making easy too.
Voice Keyboard Pro has a free tier. Open the Anki Add window, click the Front field, and speak your next card instead of typing it.