Sorcerer's Isle

"Computer: activate the dilithium Crystals and proceed to warp nine."

One of the great things about OSX is that it lets me talk to my computer. Of course, I can talk to my Windows PC too, but I don't need to be halucinating to receive a reply from my Mac.

OSX comes with both speech recognition and speech synthesis technology built into it, allowing you to speak commands such as "switch to Lightroom" to have OSX bring that window to the front. If a dialog window pops up that you don't see, you're politely asked "excuse me, did you want to save that file?", "pardon me, but are you sure you wish to start a thermonuclear war?", and so on.

If you're in the need for cheering up, you can say "computer, tell me a joke", and proceed to cringe at the awful knock-knock joke which you then receive.

If you get bored, you can instruct the computer to launch the chess application, and proceed to play a game of chess against the computer using voice commands like "pawn e2 to e4", "bishop f7 take d5", et cetera.

After hours of trying to achieve checkmate, you probably want to know the time. If your eyes are too tired to look at the clock, just ask "computer, what is the time?" to have the computer tell you.


Unfortunately, the recognition isn't perfect (I suspect this may be because I don't have an American accent), and it obviously doesn't work when I've got loud music streaming out of my other machine, but these are relatively minor detractions from this being A Good Thing.


So, one last thing I'll address, is how this compares to what Windows offers - or rather, doesn't offer...

Windows comes with Narrator, a screen reader. It reads the contents of the active window. And that's about it. No voice recognition, a single robotic voice, and it is very much an accessibility tool.

Apple Speech Recognition/Synthesis is not simply an accessibility tool (however, there is a range of accessibility options in OSX, including Apple VoiceOver, which fills a similar role to Microsoft Narrator) - it is a useful way for anyone to interact with their computer, and it comes out of the box with twenty unique voices.


Now if only I could figure out how to turn the holodeck on...

Posted:
10 July 2006, 18:45
Tags:
MacOS X
User Interface

There have been 2 comments.

Mike @ 2006-Oct-21 10:46
This may be an old article, but in the defence of Windows I must point out that it does infact have Speech Recognition (good luck finding it in XP, when you're not in Word atleast, but it's quite obvious in Vista).

XP's was hopeless (the American accent problem). Vista's is a vast improvement, "open Windows Media Player", and then "play Hello Goodbye - The Beatles" provides the expected result. Where it lets itself down though, is with programmes with a nonstandard interface. It is, for instance, hell to get Firefox to navigate to a page without using the mousegrid or "show numbers" to select the address bar, then manually spelling out a web-site address (often with the keyboard ;)), and then using the mousegrid or "show numbers" again to click the go button. You can click links fine though.

Sadly, though, Windows doesn't talk back.
Peter @ 2006-Oct-21 17:12
Thanks for the info! :)

Unfortunately, the XP version appears to only come with MS Office or the PLUS! pack - neither of which are things I'd want to waste money on.

Interesting to know Vista is including it though - it's not something I've seen mentioned as a feature anywhere, which I guess just shows how people still mostly treat PCs as simply mouse+keyboard+screen, rather than looking towards what they should become.
Registered Members
If unregistered, leave blank.
If unregistered, leave blank.
Unregistered Guests
Identifies your comment
Not displayed publically. Allows new comment notifications, or for the blog owner to contact you.
Link your name back to your personal website.
Comment