I have looked into this and unfortunately the database field that stored this setting was cleared by a developer who thought it was unused. So people who had turned off audio tests previously have lost that preference.
Unfortunately that can’t be restored.
As such we will bring back the toggle in the settings earlier than we had planned, it should be in place early next week.
I am sorry for the inconvenience.
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This is, BTW, one of the few reasons for me to use the web-app over the Android app at times as, on Android, you’re not able to skip the audio. This can slow down review and speed review sessions by an extreme amount, particularly when I have large amounts of items to review in a course.
Long story short: I do wish skipping audio was available on the mobile apps as well!
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Thank you for looking into it and listening to feedback!
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Excellent! Thank you very much!
And since I mean what I say, after it is restored, I will finally buy a membership of some kind. I’ve held off because I’ve never really had a need for the premium features for my particular workflow, but I’ll buy one anyways now just to show gratitude for having feedback be listened to! (And to show support for a site that I spend so much time on).
Once the toggle (or other appropriate method) is restored and confirmed working, I’ll mark your post as the solution. Thanks again!
There seems to be quite a bit of conflicting messaging going on here.
@James_g_memrise On the Reddit thread about this topic, you said “The option was removed as no one was using it so we simplified our systems.” But on here you say “the audio toggle was removed during the rebuild as a vanishingly small number of people used it so we couldn’t justify the effort to reintegrate it.” and later “The change to the settings page took place in December, but a lot of you are saying something yesterday?”
So, we went from nobody to a vanishingly small number to a lot of us complaining about something. Which is it? However many of us it is, it was enough to prompt a flurry of topics and messaging on otherwise dead forums.
“We hypothesised that…”
Did you consider asking the users?
“the audio toggle was removed during the rebuild as a vanishingly small number of people used it so we couldn’t justify the effort to reintegrate it.”
“As such we will bring back the toggle in the settings earlier than we had planned”
So you couldn’t justify the effort to reintegrate it, but despite not being able to justify the effort, you in fact planned to bring back the feature whose effort you couldn’t justify? Does that make sense to anyone?
As for why I always turn off the audio tests: I don’t need to practice recognizing which combination of letters is said. I need to know what it means. Sure, I could do this on my phone I guess, but there’s a couple problems. One, the screen is tiny. Yeah, phones are big now, but still far smaller than a monitor. Also, I can’t type on a computer keyboard with my phone.
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My statements are not contradictory, all features add effort and complexity, and a key metric on deciding if we do that is how many users a feature has.
It was missed out of the rebuild as it wasn’t used by a lot of people so we saved time and complexity by not including it. We are a small company and have to make compromises, many of which we’d rather not do but we don’t have the resources to do otherwise.
The setting was kept on our backlog as a user story as many features are, many of which come from feature requests from this forum and other user communications. In an ideal world we would build everything on our backlog, but we prioritise based on effort and reward. Now we have moved building this toggle forward because of the unanticipated change that meant users who had previously used the toggle have had that state wiped so it would benefit more people.
I hope that clears the matter up for you.
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I am also now (as of this morning) being forced to answer audio questions. This means I just have to close out the session I am doing and lose my progress when one pops up. It seems so far to be strictly when learning new words. My settings also have “no audio” selected, and I haven’t even seen an audio test in a year or more until this morning. I use the web version multiple times daily and have never had this problem before today.
(Side note: this is an accessibility issue, as well, and should really be prioritized for that reason alone. The hard of hearing do after all exist, and also use websites to learn things.)
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Then you will be absolutely thrilled to know that we already deployed the toggle to the learning settings two days ago
Boy, I sure would be if it were working at all. Please note that I did say this just started this morning, and that audio is toggled off. These are my settings as of two minutes ago:
And this is a screenshot of a Learn New Words session that I started about a minute later.
Thrilling, truly.
Did you try changing the toggle?
The copy is interim text at the moment while we await localisation so will be clearer by Friday, if you set the toggle to positive it will disable audio tests
Switching it on appears to have switched it off for now, thank you.
The text next to the button is very unclear at the moment because it’s formulated in double negative.
“when disabled you will not see”
Which lead me to believe that I should actually enable sound by setting it to the right.
But upon starting a review I got nothing. Just an empty results screen.
So it’s enable sound by keeping the button disabled to the left. 
I believe I addressed this.