Loudwalk (https://loudwalk.com/?from=hn) is an app I built for myself to review my Anki flashcards out loud on a walk, and am excited to share today.
Anki has changed my life and is probably the best habit I've managed to stick with. Apart from helping at my tech day-job and remembering random things I find interesting (relatives' birthdays, quotes, poetry), it allowed me to become conversational in Russian in 2 years and complete the first year of a French university degree in Art History - all while working full-time as CTO and co-founder at my company. I have an average memory at best, and it is crazy what Anki unlocks with consistency.
Recently I've been exploring how interacting with LLMs by voice can help me spend less time at a screen and more time active and outdoors, for two main reasons:
- wanting to be more active/healthy as I'm in my mid-thirties and starting to get back pain
- just had a newborn and spend a lot of time carrying him or doing chores around the house
Most of my time sitting at my desk is spent waiting for coding agents and reviewing Anki cards. After building Notiferry (https://notiferry.com/) to forward macOS notifications to my iPhone, the next obvious move was Loudwalk: an LLM asks your card questions, listens to your spoken answer, and grades it. Voice reviews give a cadence I don't have on screen, cutting my daily review time in half (from 90 minutes to 45), and walking while reviewing helps both memorization and mood. Time simply doesn't have the same flavor staring at a monitor vs walking in nature or holding your baby.
What Loudwalk does:
- Import your decks with full history and media from Anki (and export back to Anki with no lock-in; includes a starter deck and CSV import if you don't use Anki yet)
- Start a voice review from any deck (works with Siri so your phone stays in your pocket)
- Spoken grading + "deep dives": if you stumble on a card or want context, ask out loud to start a live conversation on the subject, with live web fact-checking when dates or connections matter. Say "next" to return to your queue
- Question rewording: rephrases questions so you memorize the concept, not the exact card wording
- Phonetic grading + deterministic timing: on-device STT mangles proper nouns, so the LLM grades phonetically/semantically against your card's answer, while response-time caps (Again/Hard/Good/Easy) are applied deterministically in code
- On-device speech recognition; grading and deep dives use OpenAI models (a mix of GPT-6 Luna and Sol + GPT-Live-1)
It runs on iPhone (iOS 26) and Apple silicon Mac (macOS 26). No Android or Windows.
I haven't planned to open-source it for now as I'm seeing if it can support me working on it long-term. Visual reviews (Anki-style) are free forever; voice reviews require a subscription ($9.99/mo) after a 7-day trial (no account or credit card required). Sync across Mac and iPhone uses append-only JSONL review logs in your own iCloud Drive - no server in the sync path, and visual reviews + sync + export work offline forever.
I switched to Loudwalk over 3 months ago (>3k spoken reviews) with first-class support for English and French, plus a CLI so coding agents can add cards at the end of a study session.
Happy to answer any questions about the app or spaced repetition!