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Control PowerPoint Presentations with Your Voice
Posted by Adam Pash at 7:00 AM on June 4, 2008
If you've started controlling your PC with your voice but were looking for more ways you can take advantage of speech recognition to make your computer do things, blogger and Microsoft employee Rob Chambers publishes a handful of free macros you can add to your Speech Macros folder to execute any time. For example, Rob's Next Slide macro advances a PowerPoint presentation when you say "Next slide" and goes back when you say "Previous slide."
He's also published a Tell Me the Weather Forecast macro that reads you the forecast when you say, for example, "What is the weather like in Seattle?" Rob's macros all offer clever ways you can put speech recognition macros to good use, and all you have to do to get started with them is install WSR Macros and put the macro files in your Speech Macros folder. Not bad. If you've put together any useful macros of your own since reading our guide to WSR Macros, let's hear about it in the comments. Thanks Brian!
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
rand0mCreep
Posted 7:22 AM 4/6/08
i went out and picked up a logitech microphone the day i read the first article on speech recognition in vista. i'm totally impressed! i suck at typing, i look at the keys. with this i can watch what i'm saying come on to the screen. i mostly use the "show numbers" command or "start firefox". people are really missing out on what vista has to offer because they've jumped on the vista sucks bandwagon. like last night i hooked my cable tv up to windows media center, set it up, got the remote control working then added voice commands. i told my computer to turn on the tv. and it didn't backtalk me!!!
the only problem i found is the mic picks up the speakers and keeps asking what i just said. i just pushed the green off button. no mic bashing, no logitech sucks, just turned the mic off...
rand0mCreep
foolish-rain
Posted 7:04 AM 4/6/08
Nice. But I'm holding out for the "Control Powerpoint Presentations with Your MIND" interface.
foolish-rain
robdew
Posted 10:41 AM 4/6/08
Because speech recognition works so well, we want to use it in front of a room of people we're trying to impress or teach.
We already have too many bad powerpoint presentations. Let's not make it worse.
robdew
mr_oshodi
Posted 12:30 PM 4/6/08
@robdew: Let's assuming that *not all ppt sucks ...... and also assume that the person who's trying impress the crowd knows what ppt is all about (entertaining content: pics, visuals, very little text, all the bells and whistles)....then this speech coolie will be a good way to go....
Few months while I was in sch, I often use my old (now lost) Dash coupled with Salling clicker software and bluetooth to control my ppt.....I usually put my phone behind my back while I flip the slides and every1 was so interested in how the magic is working..and etc.. and the fact they wanted to know how it's working when there's no usb dongle sticking out on my thinkpad notebook....
as a side note... (for those regular folks out there, we call ppt *presentations* --*talk*) in grad school... i.e. I've to give a talk in 4 hrs.....lol :D sounds weird..but thats grad sch life!
mr_oshodi
lina_zav
Posted 6:44 PM 4/6/08
Neat!
I just got an idea: how about a small device that outputs some distinct sounds inaudible for humans but that a microphone can easily pick up. That way, we could build a really cheap remote control for power point, as an alternative to RF and IR!
lina_zav
acimatti
Posted 7:55 PM 4/6/08
unfortunately it only works in with English-language versions of windows.
acimatti
xenobyte72
Posted 8:26 PM 4/6/08
According to Wired, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Part of the tip of the iceberg. Now that CallCentres and Microsoft have a usable speech recog tech, it won't be long before everyone and his granny is doing it! There will also be emotion/lie detectors. Multi-Billion credit business this!
xenobyte72
Hawaiibadboy
Posted 10:22 PM 4/6/08
I just killed a day playing with this :)
Fun stuff!!!
Hawaiibadboy
bowser15
Posted 11:32 PM 4/6/08
hey it's brian...i've been playing with the macros quite a bit. I just made a calculator where you can say, what's 3 plus 3 equal to? and it will say 3 plus 3 equals 6, it works with the basic operators addition, multiplication, division, and subtraction. I also made one this morning that you can voice dial someone's name on skype, or voice dial a number for skype to call. I think i'm going to do a youtube video to demonstrate them.
bowser15
Troy F.
Posted 12:18 AM 5/6/08
Would be much better if you could program a cue line to go to the next slide so that you don't have to actually say "Next Slide" which would break the rhythm of the presentation.
Troy F.
JamesF
Posted 2:32 AM 5/6/08
This joke goes back to 1994, (when, because of inverse Moore's Law, it was impossible)but this is recent version:
"Bill Gates was demonstrating his latest speech-recognition software. He was just about ready to start the demonstration and asked everyone in the room to quiet down.
Just then someone in the back of the room yelled, "Format C: Return."
Someone else chimed in: "Yes, Return!"
It's been claimed by some that an MP3 could tell your Vista computer to delete files.
JamesF
xenobyte72
Posted 7:01 PM 6/6/08
@Troy F.:
Is it possible to have it progress when you pause for 2 seconds?
xenobyte72