- The Ultimate MacSpeech Dictate 1.5 Global Commands List
- Dragon Dictate for Mac 2.0 Announced
- Dragon Dictate 2.0 Review
- Make Your Own Macspeech Dictate Commands
Bakari, of the Mac Photography Tips blog, has made a great tutorial video which shows one way to create new commands for MacSpeech Dictate – using the “Menu Item” command type.
There are other types of MacSpeech Dictate commands which you can make that will let you do things that don’t have a menu item, but this is one very simple way to create a new command without needing to know anything about programming or other complicated “geek stuff”. I suggest you watch the movie in full screen mode so you can see what Bakari’s doing:
At the end of the video Bakari says that one of the limitations is that MacSpeech Dictate can’t push the “Post” button in the Tweetie program because it has no menu item. However, as he hovered the mouse over that button I clearly saw the tooltip showing “⌘⏎” which are the symbols for the comand and enter keys. MacSpeech Dictate can do keystroke combinations with the verbal command “Press the keys…” or “Press the key combo…” so if we tell MacSpeech Dictate “Press the keys command enter” or, “Press the key combo command enter” then the tweet will be sent!
It’s not as neat as making a new command named “send tweet” or similar, but it works. Note that a new AppleScript command could also be used, but this is a bit more “geeky” and requires a touch of programming, so I won’t go into it here.
A note: I found that to use the “press the key combo” command that it’s important to say the whole command as if it’s one phrase. My instinct is to say the command as two phrases, as if the punctuation were something like this:
Press the key combo, “Command Enter”.
But this makes MacSpeech fail to recognise the command because I’m pronouncing it as two phrases where the program expects one. If I say it all as one phrase, more like this:
Press the key combo command enter.
Then the recognition is very good.
Do you have any programs you’ve made MacSpeech Dictate commands for, or that you’d like to make commands for and don’t know how? Leave a comment and I might write about commands for your specific needs in future articles!
- Ricky Buchanan
Philip January 15, 2010 at 1:19 pm
In my experience most of the time you don’t even have to say the word combo. For example I’m going to say press the key command V.
3 Comments For “Make Your Own Macspeech Dictate Commandsâ€
as you can see I copied and pasted the headline above. it works as well with three keys as well. Shift-command-N.
Try it, you’ll like it.
(created, edited and sent hands free with MacSpeech Dictate)