MacMost Now 39: Talking to Your Mac

Gary Rosenzweig looks at basic speech recognition built into Leopard. You can speak simple commands to your Mac ad have it perform functions.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now, did you know your Mac can listen to you I mean literally it can actually listen to what you say and do things based on voice commands let me show you how to do it, ok so to get your computer to listen to your voice first thing to do is to open your system preferences in system preferences there's a preference for speech right here speech preferences  actually there's two parts to we want to look the speech recognition part we want to turn it on then when we do that this little circle appears and it will stay whatever we do with the preferences then there's so settings you can do you can choose which microphone you can go ahead say listen only when a key is pressed so the key is the escape key now so I hold down the escape key a speak I can also just listen continuously if I want to I can also set a command key word so in other words I can say computer and then give it a command and now I'm going to go on the heading close the preference window I still got this circle here I can actually open it up by clicking on the bottom and say open speech commands window and this is a little different then the preferences its this tiny little window here the lists all the speak able commands and it will be added on to when you have applications that use speak able items so some speak able items you can use in general are things like insert today's date so for instance if I'm over here in this text edit document and I'm typing away and I basically hold the space key and say insert today's date you can see it it placed the date in there very easily now if we go back to the preferences window we can see that there's more command sets we can add all we need to do is switch from settings to commands and it lists some commands sets including front window and menu bar we can add in addition there's an open speak able items folder button click that and actually goes to a folder called speak able items this is located in the library speech folder now these are the different speak able items here we can look inside some of these folders and see some of the different things for different applications like mail quick time player and such and this is were we can also add our own commands so you can use apple script or automater to do that and just drop theme in here or create your own folder for them I find the speech recognition works best if you were a head set that way the microphone is even distance from your mouth were the built in mic will change depending on were you head moves to show you how easy it is to create a shortcut that can be used by speak able items lets just create a simple bookmark for a website back here at the preference widow were going to click on the open speak able items folder now there's are speak able items now the next thing I'm going to do is launch safari and in safari im going to go ahead and go to a website lets choose MacMost . com now I can drag the website from the address bar into the speak able items folder lets close the browser now now I got here a shortcut link im going to change that to read exactly what I want it to say so im going to say go to MacMost.com and im going to spell out dot com just to make it easy for the computer now im going to close that window and im going to hold down the escape key and dim going to see if it works go to MacMost.com and there we go it hit open the safari browser and went to MacMost.com so you can create all sorts of shortcuts for all your websites this way later this week im going to be answering some viewer email so if you have a question email me at questions at  MacMost.com and do us a favor if you enjoy these podcast go to ITunes and review us there just search in the podcast directory for MacMost also subscribe via ITunes this helps boost are ranking in iTunes and were hoping one day to see the front page of the podcast directory in iTunes tell your friends to do so to thanks until next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Comments: One Response to “MacMost Now 39: Talking to Your Mac”

JOHN

14 years ago

As my eyes grow dimmer this will help me stay online. As we seniors get older and there are more of us we will need more help with accessibility. I use Cmd-T to read text to me. The Cntrl-mouse button in and out are also a great help.

John

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 39: Talking to Your Mac

Comments: One Response to “MacMost Now 39: Talking to Your Mac”

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