Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Tip 402
Tell Your Mac to Do Things
We can file this tip under “innovative features introduced some time ago.”
Your Mac has powerful speech recognition software, which you might already
know about. What you might not know about is a different kind of speech
recognition on offer that lets you issue commands to your Mac to do things
like start apps or select options within dialog boxes. For this to work, you'll
need a Mac with a built-in microphone, although all modern portable Macs
and iMacs have this.
Activating Spoken Commands
To activate spoken commands, open System Preferences (Apple menu→System
Preferences), and click the Accessibility icon. Then click the Speakable Items
icon in the list on the left, ensure the Settings tab is selected, and click the
On radio button next to the Speakable Items heading.
A new circular floating window will appear at the top right of the desktop,
which lets you know that your Mac is waiting for voice input. All you need to
do is hold down
ESC
and speak a command, releasing
ESC
when you've finished.
To learn what commands you can speak, hold down
ESC
and say “Open speech
commands window.” This should then show a pop-up window displaying all
the commands recognized by default. You can also use Finder to browse to
~/LIBRARY/SPEECH/SPEAKABLE ITEMS
(open Finder, hit
SHIFT
+
COMMAND
+
G
, and type the
path into the dialog box before clicking Go). Any files you see there relate to
commands you can issue—a file called
QUIT THIS APPLICATION
means that you can
issue that command.
Calibrating the Microphone
It's very likely you'll need to calibrate the microphone to get the best results.
To do this, click the Calibrate button in the Speakable Items pane within
System Preferences; in the window that appears, drag the slider beneath the
audio meter to around 25 percent. Then try speaking some of the test
phrases listed on the left of the window. They'll flash if they've been recognized,
and you'll hear a “squip” sound. If none seems to work or the results are
spotty, try dragging the slider to the left or to the right. Note that on the
MacBook Pro I used for testing, I had to drag the slider to the very first bar
