speech

Eighteen months before Apple released their Siri software on the iPhone 4S, I found myself stranded in a motel in Dease Lake, British Columbia, and wrote a little speech recognition, text to voice, and computer interaction application. Here's a demo of how my Mac "Siri like" software application works:

Mac speech recognition software FAQ: Can I add my own commands to the Mac speech recognition software system, and if so, how?

While the built-in Mac speech recognition software doesn't recognize voices nearly as well as Sphinx-4, it does have one virtue: You can add custom commands to it fairly easily, as long as you don't mind writing a little AppleScript.

The short story is that if you go to this folder:

Mac speech recognition software: I just had a fun interaction with my iMac that went a little like this:

Al is standing in kitchen, peeling an avocado. It's a little quiet, so he says, "Computer, play the movie Juno."

The computer says something snarky like "Yes, master" (or in Alaska, "You betcha"). In a few moments the movie begins playing.

Al smiles.

As I keep diving deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole that is the Mac OS X text to speech (voice) capability, I'm reminded that one cool thing you can do is have your Mac OS X system read text to you. Here's a quick example of how to get your Mac to read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to you.

Mac speech recognition FAQ: How can I work around the bugs in the Apple Mac speech recognition software?

I'd like to say I've been having a great time with the Mac OS X speech recognition capabilities in OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), but the truth is that it seems to have a lot of bugs. Many AppleScript developers on the internet are saying that Apple apparently "broke" the speech recognition server in Leopard, and has never fixed it in Snow Leopard. That's a real bummer, because it's a lot of fun to work with.