2004-03-07

Mac OS X 10.3 Speech Recognition

For some reason I decided to play with the speech commands available on my Mac. This is something I'd tried back with OS 9. I concluded at that time that it was a neat feature to play with but not very useful. I have now acheived a new level of dorkdom... and the illness has spread to my brother. The two of us have now spent hours talking to our computers. It's quite a sight. "Computer: do this" and "Computer: do that".

What I've discovered (aside from the fact that I'm a bigger dork than I thought) is that this technology is far more powerful than I realized. After turning on the Speech Recognition in System Preferences and playing around with the obvious speech commands located in the speakable items folder I began to look around on the interweb ;)

I found this excellent hint at macosxhints. It basically discusses the use speech recognition with the Address Book which enables the opening of chats, sending email, and locating phone numbers for contacts in the built-in Mac Address Book.

Also I searched through the Mac OS help using the keywords "address book speech" and one of the found links led to this:

Make sure Speakable Items is turned on in Speech preferences.

Choose Apple menu > System Preferences and click Speech. Click Speech Recognition, then click the On/Off button, and then select On next to Apple Speakable Items.

Make the application that contains the shortcut you want to make speakable active and speak the command: "Define a keyboard command."

Press the keys for the keyboard shortcut and click OK.

Type the name you want to use for the command in the text box in the "Define keyboard command" dialog, and select whether to allow using this command just in the active application or in any application.

This is great and super easy to set up. I can switch between apps and then issue all sorts of commands. In Safari I can bring up new tabs, switch between tabs, go to websites, scroll up and down pages... all via voice. I can then switch to iCal and create a new to-do or event (drats, that does require that I type and waste all of those precious calories) then I can switch to Mail and check my mail and compose a new email to someone from my address book which again requires that I type.

The downside of Speech Recognition is that the surrounding environment needs to be relatively quiet. If this condition is met it works quite well. So, if I want to listen to music I need to use headphones which is not a huge problem.