Speakable Web Services
Explore Mac OS X’s speech recognition and its suitability for building useful, voice-driven commands that invoke external as well as local web services.
When Scotty tried to talk to a Macintosh through its mouse in Star Trek IV (1986), the joke was on Apple. Why couldn’t this famously easy-to-use computer accept the most natural form of input? Over the years, I dabbled now and then with voice command systems, but they never seemed worth the trouble — until now. I’ve been exploring the speech technologies in Mac OS X on an 800MHz TiBook, and I’m really impressed. Apple has done a marvelous job with the recognition and control systems, and now that you can script the Internet so easily in OS X, it’s straightforward to build useful voice-driven commands that invoke external as well as local services. Consider this dialog:
Me: “Temperature”
Computer: “36 degrees”
There are, of course, a million ways to look up the temperature on the Web. Most of them start with the browser. You fire it up and go to a bookmark, which in my case is http://www.weather.com/weather/local/03431. There are at least two problems with this scenario. First, you have to translate the request into an application context (the browser) and a procedure (go to bookmarks, select Local Weather). Second, you destroy your original context. For example, I’m typing these words in the Emacs Terminal-based text editor. I’d like to keep on typing, and reading what I am writing, even as I ask for and ...
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