Speak Up
- Posted by Melissa on January 7th, 2008 filed in daily life, hobbies
Late this morning I discovered the magic of Apple speech recognition and in the four plus hours I spent messing with it and assigning new commands, I transformed into the laziest girl I know. After I chased my boyfriend and his friend out of the house, I set to work really figuring the thing out. I wasn’t able to before, because my boyfriend kept confusing it by saying things like, “Computer! Find Jews!” In about two plus hours I had mastered it fairly well and was (clumsily) surfing the internet hands free, lying on the couch.
“Computer!” I said. “Open my browser!” I set the system up to make a funny high pitched sound when it recognizes and executes my commands. It chirped to let me know it understood my orders and was preparing to carry out my every whim. “Open new tab!” I said. It did. I crossed my arms behind my head and settled in. It was pretty hard to see the screen from that far away. “Computer!” I said. “Enlarge text size!” I read some articles on what websites I was able to navigate without being forced to issue my instructions in some primitive, manual way. By this time I had figured out that even though I couldn’t figure out keyboard shortcuts for the top menu, I can use verbal shortcuts. Which is awesome.
“Computer! Open Text Edit!” I barked. “New window!” “Insert today’s date!” “Select all!” “Make this into a sticky note!” I commanded. Then I mercurially demanded that it delete the note it had just made.
After that I figured out that I could play chess, which is very suited to short verbal commands, while lying on the couch. Also, the screen was plenty big so I could see everything I needed to. “Black knight B8 to A6!” And it obeyed.
When I got tired of bossing around my new slave, I turned off the speech recognition driver and decided to get some work done. But I soon realized that I sort of missed my handy little shortcuts. It seemed much easier to say, “Zoom window!” instead of clicking the little dot to do it myself. And opening things I find hard to get to? Well, that’s easy now, because my computerized indentured servant knows where these things are much better than me. So even though I have only a vague idea where to go to open the chess game, I can just say the word and get the computer to find it for me.
I love technology.
January 8th, 2008 at 9:30 am
1. …. Can the computer find Jews? And if so, how does it know?
2. Always using the mic to play Phoenix Wright was apparently just practice for this. You need to set up Enter as “Take That!”
January 10th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
No way! I didn’t even know that option was available. I’ve had my Macbook for almost a month now and I’m still using it for mainly basic functions. I think I’ll have to check that out… :)
January 10th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Zogar: 1, no Jews were located, but it could be a limited radius thing so who knows. I love Jews and would be delighted if some were located near me. 2, Phoenix Wright used to drive me nuts because I hated playing a speech recognition game in public. People seriously thing you are wrong in the head. L’chaim!
Zandria: Check out that link on Lifehacker - that’s how I learned to do it! It was actually a lot of fun playing with it. That article should give you the basics and you can play with it a little bit. If you get it activated and then say “Tell me what to say” it will bring up a menu of commands it understands, based on what window is currently active.