Mac OS X Power Hound, Second Edition

Speech

Ever get tired of typing? Sick of the mouse, too? Want to yell at your computer... and have it respond? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then Mac OS X’s speech features are worth a look.

Minimizing the Speech Feedback Window

When you turn on speech recognition (in System Preferences → Speech → → Speech Recognition tab → On/Off tab), a small speech feedback window appears and floats over all your programs (Figure 5-12). Like a gnat, this window can get awfully annoying after a while.

Swat it away by double-clicking anywhere above the triangle on the bottom; you just minimized it to the Dock. Once minimized, however, the icon continues to display the volume level it hears.

Figure 5-12. The speech bubble hovers over all other windows, just like the Exposé blob described in Section 4.2.1.

Prefix-Free Spoken Alerts

For added fun, you can have your computer announce certain events out loud. Unfortunately, it won’t say stuff like, “The American Idol runners-up tour is coming to town!” But it can, for example, tell you when your email program can’t connect or when it can’t complete a copying operation.

This feature is useful if you like to set your system to do stuff while you’re in another room. It’s also good when you have more than one machine hooked up to one monitor, and you want to know what’s going on with a machine that’s running but isn’t up on your screen. To turn ...