Speech Macros, Typing Mode and spelling Mode in Windows Speech Recognition

  • Article

A Windows Speech Recognition user wrote in this week to compliment us on Windows Speech Recognition, and to ask a couple questions. I keep seeing these same questions over and over again, so I thought I'd take the time to document my answers for everyone to see!

Here are his questions:

1.) Is Microsoft going to release a macro facility for Windows Vista?

2.) How can you get into a "spell mode"?

Macro Facility

We are planning on releasing a speech macro utility in the near future. It will enable you to do many different types of speech macros, with no programming experience what-so-ever.

With a customized phrase to be recognized, your macros will be able to:

a.) Insert text,

b.) Send keystrokes,

c.) Launch programs, and/or

d.) Pretend that you actually said something else.

It'll be able to do far more than that if you're comfortable with XML and/or VBScript/JScript.

Stay tuned here on this blog and on our team blog for more information on the impending release.

Spelling Mode

If you've ever found yourself in the situation where you wanted to spell lots of things to the computer, letter by letter, you might want to do it faster than saying, "Press Capitol H", "Press E", "Press L",  "Press L", "Press O as in Octopus", etc...

That's why we made Spelling mode!

After entering spelling mode by saying "Start Spelling", everything you say will be interpreted as letters and symbols. So ... You could then say things like "Capitol H", "E", and "L L O". If the recognizer makes a mistake, you can go back to that character, by saying the number of cell that the letter or symbol occupies, and then re-say what you wanted.

Spelling mode isn't available in all the languages that Windows Speech Recognition is available in. Perhaps we'll add it to all the other languages in the future.

Typing Mode

For all languages, though, we have something called Typing mode. After entering typing mode by saying "Start Typing", everything you say will be interpreted as a keyboard key. So you can say things like, "Control Shift Right Arrow", or "F1", or "A B C D E F G", etc... Once you're done, you can exit Typing mode by saying "Stop typing".