OS X Mountain Lion: The Missing Manual

The Mac Reads to You

As you may have noticed, Mountain Lion is quite talented when it comes to speech. Its abilities fall into three categories: typing out what you say, reading text aloud using a synthesized voice, and obeying spoken commands. For details on Mountain Lion’s new dictation feature, see Dictation. For more on the spoken commands thing, see Speakable Items.

GEM IN THE ROUGH: Talking to Chess

If your friends and coworkers are, for some reason, still unimpressed by OS X and your mastery of it, invite them over to watch you play a game of chess with your Mac—by talking to it.

(Actually, this feature isn’t purely for entertainment: Some chess players prefer to move without looking at the board. By speaking their moves to the computer—and having the computer respond by speaking its own moves—these people can play “blindfolded.”)

Open the Chess program. Unless you’ve turned it off (in Chess→Preferences), the game’s speech-recognition feature is already turned on. When it’s on, the round Feedback window should be visible onscreen.

To learn how to speak commands in a way that Chess understands, click the small gray triangle at the bottom of the Speech Feedback window to open the Speech Commands window. As usual, it lists all the commands Chess can comprehend.

You specify the location of pieces using the grid of numbers and letters along the edges of the chessboard. The white king, for example, starts on square e1 because he’s in the first row (1) and the fifth column (e). To move ...