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An Anki alternative for the cards you need to hear and say

Anki is hard to beat for text cards. When what you're learning has to be heard and spoken, a phone call makes a better review session than a screen.

By Felix, Colloquial · 31 October 2026

If you've used flashcards seriously for any length of time, you've probably used Anki, and there's a good chance you still do. It's free on the desktop, on the web and on Android (the iPhone app, AnkiMobile, is paid, and it funds the project), it has an enormous library of shared decks and add-ons for nearly everything, and since version 23.10 it has offered FSRS, a scheduler that models your memory more closely than the older SM-2 approach. I'm not going to pretend Colloquial is better at being Anki than Anki is.

I built Colloquial because of a problem that more reviews didn't fix for me. My Cantonese flashcards said I knew the words, and yet when someone used one of them in conversation at normal speed I often didn't catch it, because the cards had trained me to recognise a written prompt rather than a sound. Anki can play audio on a card, and plenty of people build excellent audio decks with it, but the review still happens on a screen: you look at the card, reveal the answer and tap one of four buttons. That works well at a desk, and the desk was the part I kept not getting to.

What Colloquial does differently

Colloquial is a flashcard app built around audio, and the review session arrives as a phone call. You pick a time, your phone rings like a real incoming call, and when you answer it plays each question out loud, waits for you to say the answer, plays the real answer so you can hear how close you came, and then listens for you to say "got it" or "needs work". The screen can stay off the whole time, so a session fits into a walk, a commute or a spare ten minutes in the kitchen, which are rarely times anyone opens a flashcard app.

Every card is a pair of audio clips, a question and an answer. You can record them in your own voice, add one of the ready-made decks from the library, or import cards you already have, including a deck exported from Anki as text. When an imported card has no audio, the phone's own voice reads it, and you can re-record any card where you'd rather hear a real person. Scheduling is spaced repetition worked out on the server, using SM-2 with a two-way rating. That's simpler than Anki's four buttons on purpose, because two short phrases are easy to say out loud with the phone against your ear, and four are not.

Where Anki is still the better choice

If most of your cards are text, images or diagrams, Anki is the better tool and I'd keep using it. The same goes for anything that needs a keyboard, like cloze deletions or typed answers, and for very large collections. Colloquial is free, and its one limit is on how many cards you keep at once, which is enough for several full decks but nowhere near a deck with thousands of cards. Anki's add-ons and its choice of schedulers are things Colloquial doesn't try to match.

Using the two together

The two sit well side by side, and that's how I'd suggest trying it. Keep your big decks in Anki, and move the cards you need to hear and say into Colloquial: the words you keep missing in conversation, the phrases you want to come out without thinking, or anything else you'll eventually need out loud, whether that's a language, medical terms or a passage you're learning by heart.

I'd start small. Pick the twenty or thirty cards you most often get wrong when you hear them rather than read them, because a short deck you can get through in one call is a better first test than everything at once. You don't have to type them again:

1. In Anki's Browse window, select those cards, then choose Notes, then Export Notes.
2. Pick "Notes in Plain Text (.txt)" and untick "Include HTML and media references", so the file holds only the words.
3. Get the file onto your phone (AirDrop or the Files app both work), open Colloquial, tap the plus button on the Decks screen, then "Import a deck from a file or text".
4. Choose which column is the question and which is the answer, and pick the language each side is spoken in, so the phone's voice reads it with the right accent.

The import tells you how many cards will fit before it adds anything. Once the deck is in, re-record the cards where the phone's voice doesn't sound right to you. Saying the answer into the phone yourself turns out to be decent practice before the first call has even rung.

If you'd rather try the idea before installing anything, answer your Anki cards out loud for a week before you reveal each answer. You'll find out quickly whether saying it is harder than recognising it, and if it is, that gap is what Colloquial is for.

Colloquial is free on iPhone (iOS 15 or newer) in 42 countries, and the Android version follows soon.