Returning

Commands

Wake up

Go to sleep

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hello, this is George Bartley, and welcome back to Celebrate Creativity. I haven't had a new episode in over a month. I want you to know that this was not the plan. Like many plans, it met real life. In my case, real life has met hand problems, oh, very hand, very painful hand problems, a carpal tunnel, tremor, doctor's appointments, and the strange experience of wanting very badly to create while the body says, not so fast. And that begins me to that brings me to the subject of this episode, at least the first part of this episode, and that is technology. Not technology as a toy, not technology as a status symbol, not technology as a tiny glowing machine that demands our loyalty and our patience. I mean technology as a doorway. The kind of technology that lets a person get back to work, back to words, back to music, back to a microphone, back to being himself. Talking to your Macintosh, returning with honesty. Now I haven't released, as I said, an episode in over a month because my hands, uh, well, and carpal tunnel, tremor, fatigue, and the practical frustrations of technology have been a common obstacle in a way I could never have imagined. But instead of treating that as failure, I want to turn this episode into the subject itself. And let me assure you, we are definitely on our way to learning about voice control. But this episode is therefore about returning after a pause, not with embarrassment, but with sheer honesty. Technology is at best when it helps people get through the door, back to writing, back to speaking, back to creating, back to independence. Now I bought my first Macintosh in 1984. Yes, back then the Mac felt like the computer for the rest of us, and that's how it was advertised. That phrase mattered. It suggested that computers were not just for corporations, technicians, or people who spoke and code. They were for teachers, artists, writers, musicians, students, disabled people, curious people, creative people. And now, more than 40 years later, I find myself returning to that same question. Is technology still for the rest of us? Or has it become one more obstacle course? If I may be permitted an aside, recently I bought and found myself wrestling with an Apple Watch. It may be a marvel of engineering, uh, but a marvel of engineering is not exactly the same thing as a useful companion. A tiny screen, hidden settings, uh, features I did not ask for, calories when I wanted steps, and hours of fiddling just to make it do the simple things I needed. That experience reminded me of something important. The question is not how many features does this device have. The question is, does this device open a door for me or uh does it put another door in my way? Which uh well kind of brings me to voice control. I know I've praised voice control in all kinds of ways and not explained how to use it as much as I would like, but stick with this podcast, and I can guarantee uh you might find that using voice control is a wonderful experience. Having said that, voice control is not perfect. It can be stubborn, it can misunderstand, it can stop listening when you most need it to listen. It has a learning curve, especially if you don't speak clearly. But when it works, and when you learn how to work with it, it can be astonishing, and you will learn how to work with it. It can let someone with painful hands keep writing. It can let someone with tremor still use a computer, it can let a podcaster return to the microphone. It can turn the Macintosh, once again, into a machine for the rest of us. I'm also trying to do something very practical. I'm working on getting an appointment with a doctor so I can manage my carpal tunnel syndrome better and manage my hand problems more intelligently. That matters because this is not just about comfort, it's about function. Podcasts, for one thing, allow me to keep my mind active. Uh and I do not simply, though, want my hands to hurt less. I want to get back to my work. I want to write, I want to edit, I want to record, I want to continue this podcast. In other words, I'm not asking medicine or technology uh to make me younger, if they could. I'm asking them to help me keep creating. So the rest of this episode is like a beginning again. Not a grand comeback, not a perfect performance, definitely, and uh just a hand on the doorknob, or perhaps, in my case, a voice at the microphone. The best technology does not ask us to worship it. It does not make us feel small, clumsy, outdated, or foolish. The best technology opens the door, steps aside, and lets us get back to being ourselves. And that is what I want talking to your Macintosh to be about. Not merely commands, not merely menus, not merely say this, then click that, but independence, creativity, accessibility, and the stubborn human desire to keep speaking. And let me close this first part of the podcast by saying that when you begin to feel comfortable with voice control, you will not only be getting things done easily with your voice only, but also see some cool animations while icons go flying across the screen and you type a letter or a document with your voice only. Now for the second part of this podcast, let me say, well, this is my intention. I'm going to really try and live up to this. To have a copy of the complete script for each episode as the transcript. And even more importantly, I want to have the commands. Some may be quite a few, and some might be not be as many. I want to have the commands that I'll be talking about in that episode on the show notes of the first page of that podcast episode. And I highly encourage you to take those commands, I'm going to try to keep them few and simple, and make them part of your voice control vocabulary on the Macintosh. Hopefully, soon you'll be able to do a great deal of your work with the Macintosh using just your voice. And now, since it's been a while, I'm going to go back to the previous episode and talk about how you turn on voice control, something you're going to have to know if you want to go any further. I want to talk about something very practical. How voice control comes with every recent Macintosh, how you turn it on, and what you are actually looking at when you face those settings for the first time. Well, because that first encounter can be a little unnerving. I remember the first time I saw voice control on the Macintosh, and I thought, well, this is interesting. But I saw it as something just for disabled people, and felt that voice control could not possibly do much that was useful for me. And I must admit that I gave up after about 30 seconds and said, no, this is something that just isn't relevant. Because I had some erroneous idea that it was impossible. But all that it needed was a little time on my part. It's not that it was badly designed, but simply because it was new. And new things often look more complicated than they really are. You go into the settings and suddenly you're looking at terms like language, microphone, show hints, play sound when uh when a command is recognized, overlay, fade, uh, overlay after inactivity, fade after, fade by, and voice control tutorial. And if you're a first-time user, you might think, well, what in the world am I looking at? And to be honest, even if you don't fully understand some of the settings, by the end of this episode or many of the future episodes, you're doing about right. It takes a while to get your bearings, but it certainly is worth it. So that's what I want you to do today. I want you to slow it all down. I want to describe what the user is seeing, uh what those items mean, and how to think about them without getting flustered. Because sometimes the most valuable thing a teacher can do is not show off. This is not dazzle, it's not race ahead. Sometimes the most valuable thing a teacher can do is simply say, in effect, let us take this one step at a time. And that's what we're going to try and do. On a recent Mac, voice control is built right into the system. You don't have to go out and buy some exotic software. You do not have to order a special program in a mysterious box. You don't have to pay extra. It's already there, part of the accessibility features of Mac OS. So the first step is simply to go into system settings, the second item on the Apple menu, then accessibility, and then voice control under the motor item. And this is where the journey begins. And I do mean journey, because voice control is not just some little switch that you flip and forget about. For many people, it can become an entirely different way of relating to the computer. Not better than everything else in every circumstance, not magical, and certainly not perfect, but different, useful, powerful, sometimes very liberating. The first thing, naturally enough, is the option to turn it on. Well, that sounds simple, and it is simple, but it's also important because this is the moment when the user is saying to the machine, I want to interact with you by voice. And that's not a small thing. The moment you turn it on, the Mac begins listening for commands and dictation. And I have no idea how it's able to understand your voice, and especially voices from so many different languages. And for some users, that can feel well, feel exciting. For others, it can feel a little strange, perhaps even a little theatrical. You're no longer typing at a machine, you are speaking to it. And that is one of the first things I want listeners to understand. It feels a little odd at first, but that's perfectly normal. Of course, it feels odd. Talking to a computer in a serious, sustained way is not how most of us were first taught to use a computer. But strange is not the same as bad. Very often, strange is simply the first stage of learning. The first time you turn on voice control, don't be surprised if your Mac says it needs to download something. That does not mean you are installing some strange new app. It simply means your Mac is getting the speech recognition files that it needs so it can understand your voice commands. Once that one-time download is finished, voice control can work without an internet connection. If you're helping someone set this up for the first time, make sure the Mac is connected to the internet. After that, voice control is not dependent on being online. So that is exactly why it makes sense that Apple makes the user deliberately turn it on, choose the language, choose the microphone, and complete the first-time setup or download. Once voice control is active, Apple describes it as letting you speak commands to interact with the Mac. And Apple's related voice control guidance includes commands such as go to sleep and wake up to pause or resume listening. There's a good reason voice control does not simply start controlling your computer the moment you buy a Mac. If it were automatically awake and listening all the time, ordinary conversation might accidentally become computer commands. And we'll talk about this a great deal later. You could say something like, wake up, click that, or open this, and suddenly the cursor might start doing things you never intended. So Apple makes voice control something you or a friend deliberately turns on and set up. And by the way, as uh as you might be able to imagine, I've turned off voice control uh for the recording of this podcast. Otherwise, uh the cursor would be doing things all over the screen every time I set a command. Now let's go back and look at the first setting, one that really blows my mind, language. This means exactly what it sounds like. What language do you want voice control to use when it listens to you and interprets what you're saying? For most of my listeners, that will probably mean English. But even then, it matters. You want the Mac set to the language you are actually using. That is how it knows what kinds of words, sounds, and commands to expect. So, in a very real sense, language is the foundation, not math. It's language, it's the ground floor. If that setting is off, other things may become harder than they need to be. And then comes the math from of the microphone. Again, this might sound simple, but it matters a great deal. Which microphone do you want the Mac to listen through? The built-in microphone, a headset, some external microphone? Well, let me per point out my uh situation here. I have um a Mac 2 Mini or Mac Mini 2, and the speaker on it is really dorky. It's not very loud at all. So, I mean, I don't use the Mac Mini microphone at all, but instead I use a sure S-H-U-R-E MV88 Plus. Now, the other day I tried a 25-year-old Yeti blue ball stereo microphone, uh, and using that old microphone to record a podcast resulted resorted in uh really bad sound, but it was perfectly okay to use for voice control because voice control uh well is really seems to me is only concerned about the level of your sound and that the words are clear, not that the sound is recording quality. Uh this is not really an abstract technicality, it is practical. Which microphone hears you clearly? That is the question. Some people will blame themselves when technology does not respond well. They think, well, maybe I'm speaking badly, maybe I am doing something wrong, maybe I'm not cut out for this. But sometimes the problem is simply that the wrong microphone is selected, or the microphone is too far away, or that there's too much room noise. This should be encouraging because it reminds us that not every problem is personal. Sometimes it's just a setting. It's not that it was badly designed, uh, but simply because it was new to us. Now, this is probably as good a time as any to go into a setting that Apple seems not to say anything about, and that is the sound setting on the left side of the bar directly under system settings. Again, that's the sound setting on the left side of the bar directly under system settings. You see, one day I was having a real problem with voice control understanding any of my spoken commands, and I went to Chat GPT, I'll talk about the importance of this later, and explained my problem. It suggested that I go to sound directly under notifications and do two things. And note I'm not going to anything that has specifically to do with voice control. First, I had chosen the microphone that I wanted to use under input. First, here, let me take a little aside. Think of output as sound that comes out and input as sound that goes in. And that really took me a long time to get straight. So I wanted to talk about that. Output versus input. And uh very importantly, let's get on back to input. Very importantly, be sure that your input volume for the speaker or the microphone, which is the volume that voice control listens to, is really cranked up. Uh I in fact I have it up all the way. I have no idea what your voice might sound like to voice control, but the important thing is that it be loud enough to hear. Kind of like expecting a keyboard to type words on a screen when the keyboard is in another room. The computer itself doesn't sense the presence of the keyboard. I hope that makes sense. And you and you want to be able to have the computer sense the presence of the microphone, as well as, you know, understand what's uh the words that are uh going through the microphone. In other words, understanding your voice. This really isn't that complicated. Just speak clearly and distinctly with your input volume loud enough. But I digress. Let me get back to accessibility, voice control, and hints. I like this setting very much because it suggests a certain generosity in the design. Show hints means the computer can offer suggestions on the screen about what you might say or do. Let's go into that further, because for a beginner, that can be tremendously helpful. You see, one of the hardest parts of learning voice control is not always the commands themselves. It's that blank moment when you think, all right, now what did I say? Did the computer hear me? Well, hints can fill in that silence. They can remind you, they can point the way, they can make the whole experience feel less like being thrown into deep water and not being able to swim. So if I were advising a beginner, I would say there is absolutely no shame in leaving show hints on. Quite the opposite. It's a sensible way to learn. After that comes place sound when command is recognized. Now this might sound like a little minor setting, but it actually makes a huge difference. It means that when the Mac recognizes a speck a spoken command, it gives you an audible signal. It'll go like who and then do whatever it's supposed to do. Now you might ask, why does that help? Well, you see, when you're talking to a computer, one of the maddening questions is did it hear me? Did it understand me? Did it recognize the command? Or am I speaking into thin air? Well, that little sound can answer the question. It gives feedback, it gives reassurance, it tells you that the machine has, at the very least, registered what you said as a command. Some people may find that very comforting. Others may eventually find it unnecessary or even irritating. But for a beginner, feedback is definitely a very good thing. Now we reach a very important word, overlay. And this might be hard, especially to wrap your head around it first, so don't worry, we'll really get into this. Overlay is one of the ideas that makes voice control especially interesting. An overlay puts helpful information on the screen, names, numbers, sometimes a grid, so that you can refer to what is on the screen more easily with your voice. In other words, it helps make the screen speakable. And that's really rather remarkable. Instead of staring at a screen and vaguely wondering, well, what do I say now? You're given visual clues. Perhaps numbers appear over items, and you can say, click five, or names appear and you can speak the name. It's like a bridge between sight and speech, a very practical bridge. Now, some people will find overlays helpful immediately. Other people may think they make the screen look crowded. Both reactions are understandable. But the point is that overlay is there to help you get hold of what is on the screen by voice. Then comes the somewhat longer phrase uh fade overlay after inactivity. And don't worry about this too much right now. But what it means is that if the overlay is visible and you stop using it for a while, the mat can dim it so that it becomes less visually intrusive. And that strikes me as really quite thoughtful because overlays can be useful, but they can also be busy looking. So the system allows them to recede a bit when they're not actually actively needed. Then again, if this seems a little confusing at first, well, you're doing about right. Once you understand that, the next two settings become much easier to understand. Fade after means after how much time should the fading begin. Fade by means how much should it fade. Those two phrases sound similar, so they can be confusing at first. But the distinction is simple. Fade after is about when. That's really all there is to it. And sometimes once a thing is said plainly, it stops being intimidating. Finally, there is the voice control tutorial. I strongly like the idea of the tutorial because it gives the user a place to practice, not to perform, not to impress anybody, simply to practice. And practice matters. There's a big difference between hearing about a command and actually speaking it aloud. Reading about voice control is one thing. Hearing a podcast about it is another. But using it is is wonderful. The tutorial helps you begin making that move from theory to habit. And habits are what matter in the long run. So I'm going to ask you to use the voice control tutorial by itself. I'm not gonna go over it right now. See what you can figure out just from the tutorial. And I think you might find that uh uh you can do you do better than uh than what you think. See, the ultimate goal is not merely to know in some abstract way that voice control exists. The goal is to reach a point where using it begun begins to feel natural, not effortless every second, perhaps, not flawless or flawless, but natural. And the only way you that could happen is because of repetition. So if I were summing up these settings for a newcomer, I would say something like this. What you are facing in that menu is not a collection of mysterious threats, it's a set of practical choices. Let me go through them real briefly here. Language? What language are you using? Microphone? How should the Mac hear you? Show hints? Would you like guidance while learning? Play sound when command is recognized. Would audio feedback help? Yes, definitely. Overlay? Would visible labels help you speak to the screen? Fade overlay after inactivity? Should those labels dim when not in use? Fade after? When should that happen? Fade by? How much should they dim? Tutorial. Would you like a guided place to practice? And again, let me say something about the tutorial. If you have problems with it at first, again, you're doing about right. Just keep doing it over and over. And after a few times it'll sink in and it'll get to the point where you perform a command on some text on the screen without even thinking. Sort of. Well, that's the way it should be. You might not get there the first time, but after a while the commands become completely logical and even second nature. Put that way, it doesn't seem so frightening, does it? And that is one of the things I most want to say in this episode. For many of us, technology is hardest at the beginning, not because it is always genuinely difficult, but because we do not yet have a mental map. We do not yet know the territory. Everything seems equally strange, everything seems equally important, everything seems equally likely to grow wrong. But once someone walks you through it, once someone says, This is what you're looking at, this is what it means, this is why it is there, suddenly the ground becomes firmer. You can begin, and beginning matters. Because voice control at its best is merely, is not merely about convenience. It can be about reduced strain, as I can avow to. It can be about independence, it can be about access, it can be about making creativity and work possible on days when the hands are tired, are painful, or unreliable. And that is no small thing. Later we will go into the practice of writing commands and dealing with specific vocabulary. But again, I'll be going into all those in uh future episodes. Later, I do want to get much more into the nuts and bolts, what commands you say, how they work, what happens when they go wrong, how to correct them, and how to move around the screen and all the rest. We've looked at the settings not as enemies, not as jargon, not as some cold machinery meant to make us feel foolish, but as choices, understandable choices, usable choices. Now let me end this episode with two of the most important commands you will probably ever use. If you look at your standard Macintosh desktop, you will uh now see an additional icon at the top right of the menu bar. There are about 11 menu items underneath it, ending with voice control settings. Uh and that um well uh kind of takes you back to where you installed voice control in the first place. Now the first command I'd like for you to learn is wake up. If I actually had voice control on, by the way, uh you'd hear a little whoosh when that came on as a hint. Uh but anyway, uh I um uh uh wake up means start listening. Again, it means start listening. In fact, you can also say start listening to uh mean wake up, although I think it's a lot easier to say, or it's easier for me to remember, wake up, for voice control to listen to your spoken commands. Then when you want to turn off voice control, and there are some situations where you will definitely want to do to this, and we'll go into that later, such as in YouTube or any program that extensively uses audio, you would simply say, Go to sleep. And there will be a line through the small icon at the top and uh side of the page. Both times you should hear a little whoosh along with the wake up or stop listening command, respectively. And I promise you this will be the last section of this podcast episode, and it is very short. Now, after you've set up voice control, uh what is the vocal command that you would use to start using voice control? Now, if you said wake up, then you were right. I know this sounds silly, but say this four or five more times. Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up. I had the ho the wishes seemed to be going on and off there. Well, sometimes repetition is the best way to learn anything, and I almost hesitate to try this again. Uh now finally, what is the vocal command that you use to temporarily turn off voice control? Well, the obvious answer is go to sleep. And let's hope we can get through this one, saying it several times, because it keeps turning back on itself. Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep, and go to sleep. Okay, well, join me for future episodes of how to talk to your Macintosh, where we learn more commands until you can use your Macintosh hands free. This is George Bartley for celebrate creativity.