Make Your Own Macspeech Dictate Commands

By Ricky Buchanan • January 12, 2010

This entry is part 20 of 22 in the series Speech-to-Text Compilation

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 is the symbol for “comand enter”. 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

Series Navigation«Dictate News: Bluetooth, Mouse Control, and DiscountsNew MacSpeech Scribe For Transcription»

Categories: Information, OS X, Speech to Text, Users
Tags: dictation, dictation to text, dragon for mac, features, speech recognition, Speech to Text, talk to your mac, voice commands, voice recognition, voice to text

About the Author

Ricky Buchanan

Ricky Buchanan is 34 years old and the founder and main writer for ATMac. She's bedridden with severe CFS/ME or perhaps a primary mitochondrial disorder - the doctors are not sure. When she's not working on ATMac or her other websites she composes music, listens to audio books, does other disability advocacy, watches TV with her flatmate, and enjoys her cat.

5 Comments For “Make Your Own Macspeech Dictate Commands”

Make Your Own Macspeech Dictate Commands « AccessTech News Jan 12th, 2010 at 10:42 pm

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Philip Jan 15th, 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 Commands”

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)
uberVU - social comments Feb 2nd, 2010 at 9:52 pm

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