Speech Commands in OS X
May 24th, 2005Today, I have just discovered Speakable Items in Mac OS X, and, man, is it *awesome*!
I just turned on Listening in your System Preferences, and my iBook began listening for voice commands. It also provided a floating palette for feedback, so I could see if it heard me. I could optionally have it listen only if a key is pressed and held, or after I say a key word, like “Computer”. There’s also a Speakable Items palette that shows the user what commands the computer knows, and one can add one’s own commands by making AppleScripts that run the command, and name it whatever you want to say to run the command, then move it to the ~/Library/Speech/Speakable\ Items/ folder
I easily made some iTunes scripts for play, pause, and other commands.
The speech recognition worked real well, and understood my commands most of the time. What really surprised me was when it understood the command “open nFoldMan” and actually started the application.
Mac OS X continues to give me wonderful surprises even after I used it for a year. And I definitely don’t regret switching.