Creating Custom Voice Control Commands For Your Mac

Voice Control on your Mac is more powerful than ever, but it can take a few carefully chosen commands to do what you want. Instead, you can add custom commands to quickly go to web pages, choose menu items type long passages of text and other things.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to create voice control custom commands on your Mac.
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So I've talked about voice control commands in the past. You get to them by going in System Preferences to Accessibility then looking for Voice Control on the left. Then you have to enable it. Once you enable it there's a list of commands that you can look at here. It's pretty extensive. There's a lot you can do. Most of all you can access anything in the Menu Bar and you can click anywhere on the screen. But that usually takes a lot of describing to show exactly which menu item you want to trigger or what you want to click on on the screen. You can define your own commands that speed things up a great deal. The Command for that is in the list here to Make this Speakable. You could see some other options here like Create Command. You can use that to make your own custom commands that will appear here at the top. So let's try it out.
I'm going to use Safari to give you an idea of how this will make things a lot easier. First I'm going to select my microphone. I'm going to turn on Enable Voice Control and then I'm going to get a little control there that I can turn On or Off. I'm going to have to do that a lot here since I'm talking to you in making this tutorial. I don't want my Mac to confuse that with a Command. So now I've got this control here at the bottom. I'm going to put it to sleep and let's go to Safari. You could see how it stays on top. Now let's say I want to navigate somewhere, like to the Apple Website in Safari. This is one way I could do it without a custom command. (speaking- Click File, Click Open Location, Apple.com, Press Return.) So you could see there that works. You could also do this. (speaking- Show Grid, Choose 3, Choose 9, Click 3, 
Wikipedia.org, Press Return.) 
Now wouldn't it be great if you could just go to a webpage, especially one you visit all the time. Well you can! All you need to do is use that Create Command or Make this Speakable in order to create your own custom voice control. So now that I'm at this webpage it's actually easy to do. So I'll just wake this up and use it. (speaking-Create Command.) So now you can see here I come up with this custom interface and for When I say: I could type whatever I want. So I could say Wikipedia and while using I can do any application but it makes more sense to just choose the application I'm currently using so Safari. What do I want it to do? Well, Open URL. It recognizes that already. There are a variety of other things you could choose which could be interesting in other situations. Then for Open URL the parameter is the website it is going to go to. So now I could hit Save. All I have here is Wikipedia as the phrase I need to speak. So back here at Apple.com I'll wakeup Voice Control and I'll try it out. (Wikipedia) So you can see how easy that worked. I can continue to add more commands like this. All I need to do is go to the page I want to go to and then say Create Command and it will create command for that URL. 
If I look down Voice Control under Commands I'll see this command at the top of the list under Custom. Here's where I can Edit it. So you can see I can change what it says. I can have it work in other apps, not just Safari. Since the command is Open URL it will automatically open up my default browser. So I change this while using any application and maybe make it a little harder to accidentally say. Now when I try to use it, even if I'm here in System Preferences, (speaking- Go To Site Wikipedia.) You can see how well it works. But in addition to opening a URL I can also assign this to menu commands. All I need to do is speak the command when I'm about to click on it. So, for instance, let's say I want to have a shortcut for going to Reader View. Let's go into Wikipedia here and to an article and now I can click here to go to Reader View. But I want to have that done by a Voice Command. So I'm going to wakeup Voice Control and try creating a command. (speaking- Create Command.) So you could see how it took the menu I was about to select and it put that in here under Perform. So I could change it to just Safari since you're not going to find Show Reader in another application. I can leave the suggested Show Reader there. I'll use Save. Now let me try it. (speaking- Show Reader.) Now, of course, to get out of Reader I have another command, it's Hide Reader. So let's try that. (speaking- Create Command) and I'll change this to Safari and leave everything else as is. Now I've got that set. (speaking- Hide Reader.) So I can take any command here that I want, anything in the menu, and turn that into a command I can instantly execute without having to trigger the menu and then trigger the item itself.
This works for other apps too. So, for instance, I can add a command to reply to the message I'm viewing. That would normally be under Message Reply. So make a voice control to add the command (speaking- Create Command.) You could see here it says Reply, Mail, and it will select Reply. So I can change that to Reply to This Message. Save it. (speaking- Reply to this message.) Then, of course, it would be easy to add even more than that because under Message there's Send. So I could add one for that as well. So I could make that Send This Message. Then I could use voice control to type what I want to type and quickly and easily respond to email. I could have done all of that using the built-in voice control commands. Then I would have to be calling up menus, finding the menu item, and all of that. I could really do it much faster if I assign Commands to the things I use often.
Now there's other things you can do as well. You can add these in System Preferences or you can try creating a command when there's nothing to do. For instance, Create Command. So you can see I can type anything I want. So let's type this. I can set it to Mail. One of the things I can choose is Paste Text. I can type whatever I want here. So you can see I've got a little intro here and a couple of blank lines. I'll hit Save. So now when I want to start an email I can easily insert that. (speaking- Standard Start to an Email Message.) You could also, of course, add those commands here just by clicking on the Plus button and you have all those same options. So you could actually choose a keyboard shortcut if that's the fastest way to create this command. You could also select a Menu and then type what that menu is. You could even, of course, run an automator workflow if you want to create something more complex. There's also the interesting option, Open Finder Items. When you choose that it's going to prompt you for some Finder items to open. It lets you choose more than one. So, for instance, I can have this RTF file and also this jpeg open and for good measure let's have this video open as well. All three are listed there. Now I can type something like that and let's give that one a try. (speaking- open my projects files.) Now you could see all three of those things opened. There's the video. Here's that image and here is that text file opened up in TextEdit.
So Voice Control is already pretty powerful on your Mac. But you can see how much more powerful it can be if you take the time to setup some custom commands in advance.

Comments: 4 Responses to “Creating Custom Voice Control Commands For Your Mac”

Bill Braun

4 years ago

Gary,

When I turn "Enable Voice Control," it says "Keyboard Dictation is disabled while Voice Control is turned on". So in order to use either I have to turn or the other?

Is there a toggle that will flip them back and forth or is there another way around this?

Gary Rosenzweig

Bill: When Voice Control is on, you are using "enhanced" dictation. You don't need the regular dictation. Try it and you'll see.

judith jones

I would like to use the enhanced dictation feature how do I turn voice control on for this purpose thank you

Judith: I show that in this video, but here is a video just about dictation: https://macmost.com/learn-how-to-use-dictation-on-your-mac.html

Comments Closed.

Creating Custom Voice Control Commands For Your Mac

Comments: 4 Responses to “Creating Custom Voice Control Commands For Your Mac”

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