This Month: Apple’s Speakable Items
Last month, I mentioned how I waited until last Christmas to install Mac OS 8.5, and also mentioned how impressed I was by it. Since then, I have had the opportunity to play around with the release, and check out some of the extra tricks. One of these neat new features is Speakable Items.
You can choose to install Apple’s Speech Recognition software as a custom installation off of the Mac OS 8.5 CD. Doing so also installs dozens of ready-made Speakable Items; the option to turn them on can be found in the Speech control panel.
So, now, what do these Speakable Items do? Quite simply, you speak them, and the computer does what you tell it to. By speaking the name of the item of you want to activate, you can verbally make your computer open an application, switch views of a particular window, empty the trash, or even tell you joke! The latter is one of my personal favorites, even though I do hope that in the future Apple can be funnier than the lame knock-knock jokes that are included!
It’s easy for you to create your own voice commands, and there’s even a built-in Speakable Item that let’s you make a new Speakable Item! You can also rename the items anything you want; that way, you can decide what you say or how you want to say it.
There are some things to keep in mind when making your own naming schemes, however. Apple recommends keeping the names of the items fairly long in order to avoid similar sounding names, but some of the commands are just too long for my taste. (For example, I changed “move the selected item to the trash” to “Delete this.”) However, Apple does have a good point: in my experience, the computer confused “Open ClarisWorks” and “Open CodeWarrior” quite often, and occasionally even opened Outlook Express when I wanted Internet Explorer. (Hey, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature–Speakable Items teaches you to use good diction! 🙂
A second thing you must be careful about when naming Speakable Items is how you type the name. The computer doesn’t handle punctuation, numbers, and abbreviations very well; you’re better off typing the whole word(s) out or inserting spaces to separate certain letters. Although the documentation provides some guidelines, it’s still a bit of a trial-and-error experiment.
Another option is whether or not you address the computer directly before issuing a spoken command. For example, with this setting turned off, saying “Open CodeWarrior” will activate that particular Speakable Item, but with the setting turned on, you have to say “Mac, Open CodeWarrior” to achieve that effect. How you choose to address your Mac is optional and user-configurable, so you can name your computer anything you want. You can also choose which voice and cartoon sketch you want to represent your Mac on your desktop. I’m still not a big fan of many of the available voices, but as far as the cartoon sketches go, my favorite by a landslide is Vincent, who is nothing but an ear. (Whew! After those terrible knock-knock jokes, I needed something like that to reaffirm my faith in Apple’s sense of humor!)
A nice feature of the cartoon characters is that they show when the computer can hear you talking, and how well it can hear you. This is generally not a problem–I got my PowerBook 1400 (with its teeny-tiny internal microphone) to activate a spoken command when I was standing in the opposite corner of my dorm room (roughly fifteen feet away). In fact, sometimes my Mac even listens too well. One night when I was telling my roommate to take out the trash, my Mac beeped at me and informed me that there was nothing in the trash to empty!
No matter how well your Mac can hear you, though, there are a couple of annoyances involved in speaking to it. You must speak very clearly, not only to avoid mixups like I mentioned above, but also to simply allow the computer to recognize what you’re saying. You also learn quickly to speak at an even rate, because if you say the command too quickly, or break up the command with too long of a pause in between words, the computer won’t understand you.
So, what’s the verdict on these Speakable Items? The usefulness of the feature is kind of gray, but the pure coolness factor is way off the charts; the look on my girlfriend’s face when my Mac responded to my request that it say hi to her was almost worth the price of upgrading to Mac OS 8.5 all by itself!
Unfortunately, that’s all I’ve come to regard the Speakable Items as: a really cool novelty. In my opinion, the software mixes up words too often, is too particular on how you deliver your spoken commands, and the included voices are just too painful to listen to when your Mac tries to talk back to you. Also, maybe I’m just too used to using keyboard macros and such to accomplish many of the things that the Speakable Items can do. You can install as many shortcut features on your Mac as you want, but chances are you’ll adopt only one or two them as your primary ones, and for me that’s my beloved macros, and to a lesser extent contextual menus. There just isn’t any room left in my computing habits for Speakable Items.
With that said, though, I do applaud Apple for delivering an extremely neat piece of software like this and including it with the Operating System for free. With another revision or two, Speakable Items could easily change the way we interact with our Macs, and for people who don’t like typing or mousing all the time, or suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome, the current implementation is definitely good enough to use effectively. If voice recognition and speech technology sounds cool to you, then I suggest getting your Mac OS 8.5 CD out again and doing a custom installation for the speech recognition software. Try it out, be both amused and amazed for a while, and then decide whether or not it’s worth keeping Speakable Items around. Just be prepared for a lot of lame knock-knock jokes.
Mike Wallinga
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