Rand Wacker

Tonight I sat down to try and tackle a small project (setting up a secure way to share my music archive with Alexis’s new iBook on the wireless network). As usually happens when playing with a Mac, I quickly went down a couple of new tangents. Tonight I found something so cool and useful that I had to share it: Apple Speakable Items. I actually found this looking for the text-to-speech options to try and have the computer read to me in the car…don’t ask.

I’ve always thought the idea of talking to your computer was a little, well, lame. I usually have things organized such that its quicker to execute something with a few keystrokes than to navigate a number of audio prompts. The first thing that popped up in the Speech Commands Window were commands for the Address Book. I’ve always wondered what the “Show Large Text” option from the address book cards would be useful for. Well, hit the magic key (or speak the magic word) and then say “Home Phone for Aaron Smith”, boom, popped up on your screen so you can punch it in to your phone. Say “Thanks” and it goes away (so polite). There’s a whole host of other options, and some amount of speech control is useful when say, wrapping presents. Wow, impressive.