Hi there, I am a film and video editor and I want to make Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro and so on, speakable. I want to be able to open, switch and close documents with ease. Anybody got a script for this, I am new to AppleScripting so I wouldnât know how too.
Using speech to control an application is still largely a hit-or-miss affair. Youâll have to play with it some to find out how well it works for you.
The basic process is that you write a script to do whatever you want. Consider the following simple example:
beep
You then save the script as a compiled script in ~/Library/Speech/Speakable Items/Application Speakable Items// (where is the name of the application you want the script to be active in, e.g. âFinal Cut Proâ.
Then, whenever that application is frontmost, the speech engine will try to recognize spoken words that match the name of the script. So, for example if you named this script âbeepâ, any time you say âbeepâ (or, more precisely, any time the speech engine thinks you say âbeepâ, the script will run.
In this way itâs fairly easy to write a series of scripts that perform specific actions. Itâs harder to get them to be flexible (e.g. itâs easy to tell it to open a specific file on disk, but itâs harder to get it to open an arbitrary file name you speak), so youâll usually find you use some kind of hybrid speech/keyboard interface (e.g. a script that opens the âOpen Fileâ dialog but that you use the keyboard and mouse to select the specific file).
Then, of course, thereâs the issue with the reliability of the recognition engine. There are only so many times you feel like saying âopen, dammitâ before you give up and hit Command-O
Thanks for the reply, it does seem a hell of a lot of effort for a speech system that hardly works! I might give iListen a look or something like that, I think that has easily programmable macros.