I’ve played with speech recognition in Vista on and off since it was released and while I like it I do get funny looks – at work I share and office and at home the dog thinks I’m talking to him. But sometimes when it’s just me I turn it back on and play (it’s particularly good on my UMPC which has a very small keyboard)

But it’s not that quick to do some thing. As a user who grew up with keyboard shortcuts (I started using computers before mice were common so cut me some slack) I still hit Ctrl-V instead of right-click, select paste. So having to go through the somewhat laborious process of talking my computer through navigating menus in Outlook is occasionally frustrating.

So I was really pleased to see the arrival of Speech Macros – or more properly “Windows Speech Recognition Macros tool” aka WSRMacros. It means I can now create a macro that is triggered by a spoken comment. The macros can be a single action (eg “insert signature”) or more complex (eg selecting a particular playlist and playing it)

<speechMacros>

<!-- Play Artist Command -->

<command>

<listenFor>play ?the ?artist [Artists]</listenFor>

<listenFor>play ?the band [Artists]</listenFor>

<listenFor>play ?the group [Artists]</listenFor>

<disambiguate title="Which artist do you want to play?" prompt="Choose an Artist" timeout="25" propname="Artist"/>

<wmpMediaControl command="pause"/>

<speak>Playing Artist {[Artist]}</speak>

<wmpMediaPlay attrname="WM/AlbumArtist" attrvalue="{[Artist]}"/>

</command>

</speechMacros>

So go on… next time you’re alone in your office give it a try. Fire up Vista speech recognition and give it a go. If your accent is like mine be prepared to spend a little while on training but you can work with the WSRMacros with minimal preparation.

While it’s great on a desktop or laptop, try it out on a UMPC with constrained keyboard to really see the power of being able to talk to your computer.

Now all we need is a Live Gallery to share macros….