Controlling your Mac with you voice

[poppe]

Hello.

There is a program that I think MacBytes mentioned it. I can't remember the name of the program or who made it, but i thought it was something like iGriffin.

Anyways it was originally made to control the companies products from your Mac (from what I recall) but it was not limited to that. With this software you were able to set up commands like "Open finder" and finder would open. One user created a command where he said "Hello computer" and his Mac responded "Hello [his name here], how are you today"

Now I was wondering if anyone knew of the program I am talking about? I desperately want it on my mac...

Thank you

 

[Allotriophagy]

Is this feature not built-in to OS X?

 

[poppe]

Is this feature not built-in to OS X?

I dont know... I don't have my Mac yet. I think you can do it with automator or something like that, but it is difficult from what I remember...

 

[GimmeSlack12]

You're in luck. They do have it for Mac and it's called Mac OS X. Voice recognition is built right into the OS.

Go to System Preferences>Speech and you'll see the Speech Recognition settings in there. Explore it and figure it out. It works pretty good, not perfect though.

 

[poppe]

You're in luck. They do have it for Mac and it's called Mac OS X. Voice recognition is built right into the OS.

Go to System Preferences>Speech and you'll see the Speech Recognition settings in there. Explore it and figure it out. It works pretty good, not perfect though.

And you can make your computer talk right back to you also? I don't have a Mac so I'll try it when I get one...

 

[poppe]

Does anyone know the answer to this?

 

[pianoman]

you can set the preferences to repeat your command so when you say "open safari" it would say "opening safari."

other than that, i don't believe there any really good dictation programs for the mac.

 

[Unorthodox]

You can make any file speakable.
If you have speech recognition enabled select any file/folder/app, then activate the microphone (by default it's esc) and say "Make this speakable".

Now if you say the items name it will open
For example:
If you selected an app called "Microsoft Word" and made it speakable, now when ever you activate the microphone and say "Microsoft Word", Microsoft Word will open.

Sometimes it's better to change the name of the item you're going to make speakable.
For example:
Rename "Microsoft Word" to "Word" and then make it speakable.
You can then change the items name back to it's default name.
Now when you say "Word", Microsoft Word will still open.

You can really make this powerful by making AppleScripts speakable.
For example:
You could make a script that say "Hello, John.". You could then save it as an app with the name "Hello computer".
If you made this scrip speakable whenever you say "Hello computer" it would activate the script and the script would say "Hello John".

Of course, you use AppleScript to make much more complex scripts than that.

 

[apfhex]

Although it doesn't work very well. Holding ESC is all well and good, but you're supposed to be able to also get it to activate by speaking a keyword first (Star Trek style: "Computer, open iTunes" ). This never worked for me... it would have been cool, especially with my bluetooth headset.

 

[poppe]

You can make any file speakable.
If you have speech recognition enabled select any file/folder/app, then activate the microphone (by default it's esc) and say "Make this speakable".

Now if you say the items name it will open
For example:
If you selected an app called "Microsoft Word" and made it speakable, now when ever you activate the microphone and say "Microsoft Word", Microsoft Word will open.

Sometimes it's better to change the name of the item you're going to make speakable.
For example:
Rename "Microsoft Word" to "Word" and then make it speakable.
You can then change the items name back to it's default name.
Now when you say "Word", Microsoft Word will still open.

You can really make this powerful by making AppleScripts speakable.
For example:
You could make a script that say "Hello, John.". You could then save it as an app with the name "Hello computer".
If you made this scrip speakable whenever you say "Hello computer" it would activate the script and the script would say "Hello John".

Of course, you use AppleScript to make much more complex scripts than that.

Wow ok thanks very thorough. That sounds awesome. I'll have to just use that... I swear though that this guy was using something else... Oh well I must have misunderstood ( I do that alot )

 

[cLin]

Although it doesn't work very well. Holding ESC is all well and good, but you're supposed to be able to also get it to activate by speaking a keyword first (Star Trek style: "Computer, open iTunes" ). This never worked for me... it would have been cool, especially with my bluetooth headset.

That'll be so cool if it was possible, I'll just talk to it and make my life even more lazier...now is it possible?

 

[iminimac]

i saw a video for the built in voice recogintion so i though i would give it a go
it was great for the first half an hour and amazed me. i set it up so i could just walk into my room and go play music and music would play (the only problem was taht my music is to loud for the computer to heard the pause music command)
ive also seen a video of a guy on his imac
he would say open safari and safari would open and then he would say a website (he would have to organise it first) but i think he could go bbc and www.bbc.co.uk would open up
so voice recoginition is all good - but why dont i use it anymore?
one BIG problem
half the time it works and the other half you spend repeating the same phrase about 20 times trying to get it to work
it may just be my voice but i expect other people have problems to

 

[maxterpiece]

yeah it's kinda funny that my motorola razor can understand me better than my computer. Voice recognition has been around for a while - since before OS X. Every few years I try it out again for the hell of it. My favorite command is, "tell me a joke".

 

[GimmeSlack12]

Yeah, I'll admit that the voice recognition is not perfect in OS X. But it has come a long way!
The feature has never been quite usable to me, but then I retried it again with Tiger and realized that it has been improved quite a bit.
For dictating there are several very good programs out there. IBM ViaVoice, MacSpeech iListen, and I think Dragon Systems has one (but very $$$). iListen is a pretty good one I think. It has worked very well for me, after training it, and it would work even better if I had an actual headset Microphone instead of using my built-in iBook mic which is a bit crap.

 

[YS2003]

IBM ViaVoice for Mac OS X Edition by Nuance

Has anyone tried ViaVoice on the daily basis? I am interested in voice activation/dictation. I think it comes in handy when I need to do the reporting while driving.