Today I was asked to write a wee application for someone so that they could turn pages on their ebooks without having to reach for their keyboard or mouse… that way they could do craft or knit or whatever they are doing while they are reading.

I vaguely remember that windows has something built in, but have never really played with it before.   I have in the past turned on the screen reader and impressed my kids by making the computer saying “amusing” phrases along the lines of “Zac has a smelly bum”.

So instead of firing up Visual Studio and getting stuck into the juciy task of writing a speech recognition program…. I typed “speech recognition” into the start menu of my windows 7 computer.   And wow!  I’ve been playing with it for the last 40 minutes or so and have been most impressed.   Dictation wise it certainly misses stuff or gets the wrong words, but I did the training and it certainly improved.

But what I’m enjoying is controlling windows.

for instance, to start this blog entry  I said “Open Writer”  and it worked no problem.    In fact after I muddled my way through getting going with speech recognition I enjoyed saying “Open notepad” … “close”  over and over again.

It allows you to click anywhere on the screen, just say “mousegrid”   and a 1-9 numbered grid comes up,  say a number and it puts a smaller 1-9 numbered grid, and you hone in, till the middle square is on a place you want to click, then you say “click” or “double click”. 

if you want to enter a key, say “Press Tab”  for example.  

inside programs it understands menu entries.  In fact, while writing this I just said “File”  “Save” and it happily saved.

I think I will play around with this for a while more and try it out in visual studio.   Might be quite good for being able to do menu entries instead of grabbing for my mouse…. can keep my hands on the keyboard.

ok, wasn’t the first post I wanted to do on geeks with blogs! but hey…   will do some techy posts soon.