Absence of voice control feature

The majority of the team of AnkiDroid maintainers have agreed that there will be no “voice commands” feature in AnkiDroid. AnkiDroid as an organization will not help implementing such a feature and strongly prefer that all AnkiDroid contributors abstain too.

This decision is not a technical one but an ethical one. Even in 2011, the first time this feature was requested, many users told us that voice-recognition would allow them to review while driving. AnkiDroid maintainers do not want to contribute to distracting users while they drive. Distraction is a major cause of vehicle crashes. While we can’t avoid drivers being distracted by other apps, at least we can avoid providing an additional distraction. We want to emphasize that, since vehicle crashes involve not only the user, but also any by-stander or passenger, we can’t even ethically decide to let the user assess the risk level to themselves, as this can and will have impact on third parties.

As a flash-card app, we did not foresee the need to deal with ethical questions in our software, and had not previously discussed an ethical code. For the sake of simplicity, we will thus simply refer to ACM’s one. Rule 1.2 states “Avoid harm”. In particular “especially when those consequences are significant and unjust”. Furthermore, the code of ethics mentions all people, and not only the user of the computer.

There is, to this day, no way to disable a feature when someone is driving; even with GPS coordinates we can’t distinguish between a passenger, a driver, or maybe a public-transit passenger. Even if our term-of-service require not to use the feature while driving - which may already be against the law in many places anyway - it is a certainty that, with millions of users, many of them being stressed students with little free time, those restrictions will not be followed and uninvolved bystanders will still be harmed. It is thus safer today to just avoid this feature altogether.

We recognize that this feature could have valid use-cases, reviewing hand-free in less dangerous situations. In particular we recognize that we are rejecting an accessibility feature. While it’s not a happy decision, we believe that the trade-off between avoiding road accidents and an accessibility feature is very strongly in favor of avoiding accidents.