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Listen to your Mail.app mail Apps
I thought of doing this before, but couldn't figure out how until I read the hint on Safari and speakable items web browsing. There are a few easy things to do to get your Mail.app to read out your email for you. I find it handy while I'm getting dressed in the morning.

Open your Speakable Items (System Prefs) and turn it on. Switch to your Mail.app and say "Define Keybord Commands." A window will pop up and ask you to enter a key command. Enter "command + a" and in the field for "Speak this text," type in "Select". Do the same thing again but for the key command enter the "tab" key and type in "tab" for the text.

Now go back to your Speech preference pane and under the Spoken User Interface section, check off "Select Text When Key Is Pressed" at the bottom and define the key. I used "command + " because I have no other use for it.

Now switch to the Finder and use the "Define Keyboard Commands" command again. Use the "command + " as the keys and type in "Speak" for the text. Now check off 'Use Command in: Any Application' and you're done. Now when you go to the Mail.app ("Switch to Mail" vocally), when you have mail say "Select" (or "Tab" if Mail is in the uper window, this will take you to the bottom window with the text), then "Speak".

[Editor's note: I have not tested this myself as I'm currently microphone-less...]
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Listen to your Mail.app mail | 3 comments | Create New Account
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no work
Authored by: macubergeek on Jan 22, '03 02:01:58PM

dosn't work worth a damn
of course Apple's speach recognition sucks



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Re:no work
Authored by: _merlin on Jan 22, '03 06:13:15PM

Have you considered that your pronunciation may "suck"? People are no longer taught voice production skills at school, and a large proportion of the population doesn't even know the correct pronunciation for a lot of words, let alone use it.

I think Apple's speech recognition is admirable. It is designed in the US, for US English, yet I can speak to it in my native Sydney Australia accent and have no problems (I have radio presentation voice production training).



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Re:no work/ Listen to MAIL
Authored by: Pete Dako on Jan 23, '03 01:23:45PM

Speech recognition in OSX 10.2.3 works great for me.. and I'm in a noisy urban office environment. Surprisingly speech recognition is infinitely more accurate when i speak quietly.
I saw some of the same weird behaviours we all did with Speech in previous systems but in Jaguar this thing work great! Totally Buck Rogers. (Same goes for Ink , too but that's another topic!)

My 11 year old has his speech on continuously with an internal mac on an iDVD ... so i thought i should give it another try. i use one of those clear gel apple supplied external mics with my tower, tho i have other fancy audio gear etc.. i think the actual mic is not what's important, it's mainly just a case of doing the volume check in the speech preferences window, and then following the directions. (There's a good section on this in David Pogues OSX missing manual, as well).

Anyway after reading the hint about Safari here on this site... I added all kinds of commands and they work wonderfully well! Longer commands do work better..ie "read the new york times"...
i have been using simple one word commands like "back" and "forward" for navigating browser and finder windows.. but it's easier to trigger them unintentionally.

I'm not totally sold on MAIL however... I use it sometimes, but EUDORA is still my default browser.
despite being a longtime EUDORA user I switched to MAIL after reading all those negative comments about apple in Eudora OSX dox. I adore that MAIL is cocoa (who doesn't?) but then I switched back at least for the time being, because I just missed Eudora's "filter" capabilities..too much.. specifically automatically opening the various mailbox windows when the mail comes in... shouldn't MAIL just do that anyway? ...sigh

I'd like to add more speech commands to Eudora.. it recognizes "check my eMail"and "open my InBox" but I haven't got it reading me actual messages yet... Has anyone got that going on?



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