Using Voice Control To Click and Drag With Speech Commands

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how you can click, double click, and even drag items on your Mac using only your voice.

MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 600 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you could read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.

You can use voice control for all sorts of things on your Mac. One of the modes for voice control is to actually click anywhere on the screen using grids. Let me show you how it works. First turn on Voice Control by going to System Preferences, then Accessibility, and we'll go down here to Voice Control and Enable it. Once we do that we get this little control here where we can sleep and wake up Voice Control. So it would make it easier for me to make this tutorial if I actually have it sleeping when I'm talking and then wake it up when I'm about to do a command. But normally you would just have it on and only speak when you want something to happen.

So let's start off by selecting this file here. If I only wanted to just select it I would use grids to be able to click on it. Notice where my cursor is. I'm going to wake up the Voice Control commands here and then put my cursor here. But notice it will move when I actually make my selection. Show Grid. 6  19  click 17. So notice now my cursor has moved to exactly that location, Show Grid, to show a grid of numbers on my screen. Then I narrowed down the exact grid location by calling out the numbers as I saw them. So the entire top right corner here was position 6. When I said 6 I was able to narrow down and get a smaller grid of numbers. When the grid got too small it actually showed me a zoomed in area in another part of the screen. Once I got the grid small enough where I was actually able to use that number to click on a spot I used the command Click and the number to actually click on that location. The cursor moved there and a click was simulated that this file was selected.

Now let's say if I wanted to actually open this file. I would normally do that with a double click. Let's try that. Show grid. 6  19 double click 17. So there you could see I was able to actually able to open that file. You can use this grid system to activate pretty much anything you want on the screen. So click on any buttons, select any elements, to put the cursor anywhere that you want. If you go into System Preferences here there's a Command button. Click on that and you can see all the different commands. So there's some basic navigation and things that don't require using the cursor. But for Overlays & Mouse you can do all sorts of things like Show Grid. 

Show Numbers is a different command. That will actually show numbers over different objects on the screen like buttons and things like that. So you can just go and select those. You can also choose Menu items by just saying, click Edit menu, click View menu, things like that and there will be numbers there that you can call out and activate those. So you only really need to use the grid if it's not a specific button or specific menu that you need to select. 

So let me show you those two things. Click Edit Menu. Show Numbers. So you can see you have three different techniques that you can use to select something on the screen. You could say, click and then the name of the menu and then the word Menu. You could say, Show Numbers and both of those show numbers of things that you can click. Then the third is to use Show Grid to click anywhere on the screen. 

Now if you look here through this you can go to Overlays & Mouse and see Show Grid. You also can see Show Window Grid which will show a grid just for the current window that you're using. Show Window Grid. So you can see there I had a grid that just had three zones on it for this window. I could have narrowed things down without having to worry about the rest of the screen.

You can say, of course, Click and Double Click, which we have already looked at. Now if you want to Drag something you could say Drag and number to number. But that rarely makes sense because rarely do you actually have numbers that are precisely located over the spot where you want to start the drag and the spot where you want to end the drag. Instead you would say Start Drag and then the number and then Drop and then the number. So let's take a look at that by dragging this file to this folder. Show Grid. 6 Start drag at 19. Show Grid. 6  Drop 9. So you can see there what happened is that I first specified a starting point using Start Drag At, or you can just say Start Drag and then the number. Then Drop and then the number for the second part. But none of it actually worked until I did the drop part. Then it executed the entire thing and moved that file into that folder.

So using that plus the ability to click, double click, and you can see there's some other things here as well. There's triple click, there's Long Press, there's Click and Hold. You can even do Modifier keys here if you look at a the examples. So, for instance, under Click you can say do Modifier keys Click number. So I should be able to say Control Click and this folder here to bring up the menu of this folder. Let's give it a try. Show Grid.  6  Control click 9 and sure enough you can see that it works. It even brings up the numbers here for the menus so that I could just choose a number there to actually use that menu item. 4 

You could even just actually just move the cursor manually using things like Move Cursor Left, Move Cursor Right, Up, Down and then using commands like Single click, Double click, Triple click. Move cursor right 50 pixels. Move cursor right 50 pixels. Single click.

So there's so much you can do with this. Obviously this is built for people who need this Accessibility function because they have trouble using the Mouse or TrackPad. But just about anybody can use it if you've got a need for it. I could see using it, for instance, if I hook Mac up to a TV and I don't want to have the Mouse or TrackPad with me as I'm trying to use the Mac on that big screen.