“Speakable Items” is OS X’s built-in speech recognition feature. Using the “Create Speakable Items...” action from the Quick Dial action menu you can add commands to Speakable Items to allow for voice dialing of your Quick Dial entries (e.g., “Dial John Smith”).
A “Speakable Item” is a file or alias stored in a specific location on your Mac. With “Speakable Items” enabled in the Speech pane of the System Preferences, you simply speak the name of an item in this folder and it will open that item. If the item is an AppleScript, instead of opening the script, it will run the script. It is in this way that Dialectic is able to respond to Speakable Items for dialing Quick Dial entries. When you use the action to create Speakable Items from your Quick Dial entries, an individual AppleScript is created for each of the entries that instruct Dialectic to dial the corresponding contact.
To see the files created by using the “Create Speakable Items...” action, in the Finder, navigate to your Home folder then see the folder (“~” is shorthand for your Home folder):
~/Library/Speech/Speakable Items/
As mentioned above, the Speakable Items files created by Dialectic are AppleScript files and they are fully editable. They have two customizable aspects: the file name and the contents.
File Name. This is the phrase you will say to your computer in order to dial the number. All the Speakable Items files created by Dialectic have titles starting with the word “Dial”. What follows is the Name field from the Quick Dial Numbers editor window. Feel free to change the name of any of these “Dial” files, in the Finder, to something more convenient to say. For example, instead of a title “Dial John Smith (home)”, you might prefer something like “Call John at home”.
Contents. This is a script in the AppleScript language. In general you should not need to change this, but to do so is not difficult. Double-click the file and it will open in the Script Editor. You’ll see that the contents look something like this:
The dial number and name parameters are, respectively, the phone number Dialectic will dial and the name it associates with this number, and both of these come directly from the Quick Dial Numbers editor window. Feel free to use this example as a template for creating Speakable Items files manually using the Script Editor.
To dial the phone using your voice, you must have OS X’s Speech Recognition feature turned on. Here’s how:
- In System Preferences, go to Speech > Speech Recognition > Settings. Turn Speakable Items on, and set up the other options the way you like them. “Listen only while key is pressed” is often a preferred setting because users find they get better recognition accuracy from the computer when it is only listening at specific times, not continuously. For the sake of this example, let’s assume you have enabled this option and set Esc to be the key used to indicate the computer should listen for your command.
- Also, go to Speech > Speech Recognition > Commands. Here, you select which command sets are turned on. The Speakable Items created by Dialectic are part of the Global Speakable Items, so make sure this command set is enabled.
- So, for example, to call John Smith at home, with things configured as described above, you would do this:
- Make sure speech recognition is turned on. You can tell this because you will see the round speech input window.
- Hold Esc so the computer is listening. The round speech input window takes on an active appearance.
- Say “Dial John Smith Home” (or whatever you’ve named this particular Speakable Item). The computer recognizes this phrase and runs the script — and Dialectic dials the number.
