Mac Speech Recognition: Science Fiction Made Real

This must be one of the best hidden secrets inside your Mac, although it’s been in there since the very beginning, in 1984: Your Mac can actually talk and, what’s more, it can listen too!

1. Activate the Speech function on your Mac. Go to your System Preferences > Speech and under Speech Recognition activate Speakable Items.
2. Customize your Speech function the way you like. Personally I use the Esc key to make the Mac listen for commands. I tried using a magical keyword like “Macintosh” for a while (e.g. “Macintosh, close this application!”), but figured out it was faster to simply hit a key.
3. Click on Commands (next to Preferences under Speech Recognition) and show the folder Speakable Items. This folder contains a whole bunch of scripts. The name of each script is the command line by which you can activate the script. For example, pressing Esc and saying “Log me out” will – you guessed it – log you out!

But there’s more. Any (!) file can be made a speakable item by simply selecting the file and saying the command “Make this speakable.” A shortcut to the particular file will be placed in the Speakable Items folder.

Imagine the Possibilities!

You can now open, hide and quit applications by simply saying the name out loud. It doesn’t end there: you can get your mail (“Get my mail!”), insert today’s date, or make a random selection into a sticky note. You can even make your Mac tell you a joke!

However it doesn’t end there. Why not attribute typical Quicksilver triggers to a spoken command? (For those who don’t run Quicksilver already, you are missing out. Go check Lifehacker’s extensive posts on the subject – they will change your digital life completely). You could then simply Play and Pause iTunes by speech or e-mail a selection of text. When you want to try this, you can find the different Modules in the Application Support/Quicksilver folder. You can open them by right-clicking (control-clicking) on them, choosing Show Package Content.

Then there’s the absolute crown jewel of Speech Recognition, in my humble opinion. Using Automator (or AppleScript, Apple’s easy scripting language which you can learn in a flash) you can build your own series of actions and make them speakable. I used it the following way.

Where I study, every student uses a cheap Internet service provided by the University. Every time I opened my MacBook, I had to log in to two different University systems to get started, which was rather annoying. That’s why I made a simple Automator Action (combined with an AppleScript I found on the web) that will fill in my usernames and passwords on different websites when I say “Log me in”. After that’s done, my Mac proudly finishes the job with a nice “Thank you for logging in, Timothy!”.

It’s important to see this feature as an extension of your Mac and the tools you already use (e.g. Quicksilver with triggers or Abracadabra); it doesn’t seem efficient to run your whole OS by speech only.

If someone’s interested in the Automator action and the AppleScripts, let me know in the MLS forum. Also, a quick search with Google will provide you with lots of Automator and AppleScript resources.

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