Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Lion Edition

Speech

The Mac is quite talented when it comes to speech. Its abilities fall into two categories: speech recognition and reading text aloud.

Talking to the Mac

The Apple marketing machine may have been working too hard when it called this feature “speech recognition”—Mac OS X doesn’t take dictation, typing out what you say. (For that, you need a program like Dragon, www.nuance.com.)

Instead, Mac OS X’s speech recognition feature is what’s known as a command-and-control technology. It lets you open programs, trigger AppleScripts, choose menu commands, trigger keystrokes, and click dialog box buttons and tabs—just by speaking their names.

The on/off switch for speech recognition in Mac OS X is the Speech→Speech Recognition pane of System Preferences (Figure 15-14). Where you see “Speakable items,” click On.

Figure 15-14. Turn listening on and off here. If you turn on “Listen only while key is pressed,” then the Mac pays attention only when you’re pressing a key. It even pauses iTunes playback while you’re pressing it. If you turn on “Listen continuously with keyword,” then you have to say a keyword, which you specify here, to get the Mac’s attention before speaking each command.

The Feedback window

Check out your screen: A small, microphone-like floating window now appears (Figure 15-15). The “Esc” in its center indicates the “listen” key—the key you’re supposed to hold down when you want ...