Talking Cards

Flashcards written inline in your notes, scheduled with FSRS, and read aloud. Works on desktop and mobile, with no other plugins needed.

• Cards live in your notes. Write them in plain Markdown, RemNote or Anki style. Decks are folders.
• Spaced repetition with FSRS, the scheduler modern Anki uses.
• Read aloud. Natural voices run on your device and work offline once downloaded. Hands-free audio mode for walks and commutes.
• Swipe to grade on phones, or use buttons and keyboard shortcuts.
• Dashboard with decks, a card browser, and stats (heatmap, forecast, retention).
• Your notes are never changed unless you opt in to card IDs. Edited cards keep their progress.
• Images and image occlusion. Put pictures on cards, or cover parts of a diagram and learn them one by one.

Writing cards

Images work anywhere in a card (What is this? ;; ![[heart.png]]); a ⤢ button opens them full screen.

Image occlusion: put the cursor on a line with an image embed and run Add image occlusion (or right-click → Add image occlusion). Drag boxes over the parts to hide and type what's under each. Choose whether a card covers only the asked part or every part. The boxes are saved in the note as a small ```occlusion block under the image — plain text, synced like everything else — and the note shows the image with its boxes and an Edit boxes button.

• Code blocks with a language and %% comments %% are skipped. ;; cards inside plain ``` blocks are read; you can turn this off.
• Frontmatter cards: false skips a note.
• deck: Some/Deck overrides the folder deck.
• tts-front: es / tts-back: en-GB picks a voice language per note.
• %%say: …%% on a card line changes how it is read aloud.
• The same card in several notes is studied once. This is a setting.

Editing cards

By default a card is recognised by its text, so nothing is written into your notes. When you edit a card, Talking Cards matches it to the card it was, and its progress carries over. A matched edit can be:

• a fixed typo,
• a reworded answer,
• a changed question with the same answer.

A card rewritten from scratch starts over. Removing ;; or :: removes the card. If a match is missed, use Browse → select the card → Take progress from….

If you prefer exact IDs, turn on Settings → Write card IDs into notes. A ^tc-… ID is then added to each card the first time you study it.

Voices

The first time you ask for speech, open Settings → Voice store and download a voice:

• Voices come from Piper, with 40+ languages.
• Each is 20–60 MB.
• They run on your device, offline once downloaded.

On desktop, your system voices are offered too, where the platform provides them.

Android: Obsidian's Android app has no speech engine a plugin can reach. To use the phone's own voices (Google, Samsung…), a companion app can share them over a local voice server; see docs/voice-server.md. This is optional: the downloaded voices work without it.

Your data

Talking Cards reads every Markdown note in your vault, because cards can be written in any note; folders you list under Settings → Ignore are skipped. It writes only its own review logs (and, if you turn it on, card IDs into notes). It doesn't access files outside the vault.

• Review history goes in Talking Cards/reviews-<device>-<year>.md inside your vault, one file per device. Logs from several devices merge cleanly when synced, with no conflicts. You can move the folder in settings.
  • Tip: add that folder to Settings → Files and links → Excluded files.
• Settings are stored in the plugin's data.json.
• On each device only:
  • downloaded voices and spoken-audio cache in IndexedDB,
  • edit-snapshot.json in the plugin folder, used to follow edits made while Obsidian was closed.

Network use

Talking Cards only goes online when you download a voice or open the voice store. It sends no telemetry and has no accounts. Everything it downloads is data, not code: the speech engine (onnxruntime-web 1.22.0) ships inside main.js. It downloads:

Phone voices: the optional companion-app connection only talks to 127.0.0.1 on your phone.

Licence

GPL-3.0-or-later. The phonemizer bundled in main.js includes espeak-ng (GPL-3.0), so the plugin as a whole is GPL. Bundled components keep their own licences:

• piper-phonemize: MIT
• sherpa-onnx: Apache-2.0
• onnxruntime-web: MIT
• ts-fsrs: MIT

Each Piper voice has its own licence, listed on its model card. Some are for non-commercial use only.

Development

npm install
npm run build   # main.js
npm test        # unit tests (node --test)

• The UI harness runs the plugin in a browser against a fake Obsidian API; see test/harness/README.md.
• Obsidian's review lint rules run from lint/ (it needs TypeScript 6):

(cd lint && npm i) && lint/node_modules/.bin/eslint -c lint/eslint.config.mjs src