Background: Voice Control lets you click links by just saying “Click ”. Question: How would I do this by typing instead of speaking? (Siri has a “Type to Siri” option, but Voice Control does not). Is there really no accessibility option for letting the user type the text of the button they want to click? What I’ve tried: I tried Switch Control, but it scans for links instead of letting you jump to ones matching a given text. I’ve also tried Cmd+F in Safari to highlight links, but nothing I’ve found lets me click the highlighted link without using the mouse. I’ve been using Mouse Keys to navigate instead, albeit slowly.

Is it possible to add (or enable a built-in) Voice Control command to perform a **Right Click** in Mac OS X? That is, similar to the built-in *"Single Click"* and *"Double Click"* voice commands.

Voice control thinks there are two "Twitch" applications on my machine (see screenshot). I removed /Applications/Twitch.app (put it in the trash) and rebooted my machine in the hope that would convince OSX that that entry was no longer valid, but no dice - it still thinks there are two "Twitch" applications that need disambiguation. How do I get Voice Commands to reindex the available applications so this step is not necessary? I assume this is some OS-level reindexing that needs to happen, but the internet doesn't seem to know the answer to this question. Update: As suggested, I've 1) emptied the Trash, and 2) invoked lsregister to try to nuke whatever file associations might be causing this, to no avail. The before and after output of lsregister -dump is below.

Mac-mini:~ benson$ diff before after4 | grep Twitch.app
> path:                       /Users/benson/Applications/Chrome Apps.localized/Twitch.app (0x1cdc)
< path:                       /Users/benson/Applications/Chrome Apps.localized/Twitch.app (0x1434)
< path:                       /Applications/Twitch.app/Contents/Frameworks/Twitch Helper (GPU).app (0x1f40)
< path:                       /Users/benson/.Trash/Twitch.app (0x1f44)

So lsregister only knows about the Chrome flavor of Twitch.app (where it used to know about the item in the trash), but Voice Control still thinks there is an /Applications/Twitch.app. Selecting the entry for the item that used to be in /Applications gives this error message (as indeed it does not exist). Edit again: Tried renaming the mentioned directories in ~/Library, again to no avail. I see a sqlite db in the directory above this that

I'm on a team that builds out a React design system. One of the things we routinely do is test our components using various input devices, one of them being MacOS's Voice Control feature. When asking Voice Control to "press the end key", it sends the "F4" key. Asking to "press the home key" sends "Home" as I would expect. Turns out asking "press the F4 key" actually sends the "End" key, so these are actually swapped. Perhaps a bug in MacOS? I'm reading these in the browser in a keydown event, the e.code property if that's helpful. You can check what it does on your machine on this site: https://w3c.github.io/uievents/tools/key-event-viewer.html

Is there a keyboard shortcut to toggle Voice Control on and off on a Mac running Big Sur? Not Dictation, mind you... Voice Control (under *System Preferences > Accessibility > Voice Control*). I've looked in the Accessibility section of the Keyboard Shortcuts preference pane. Ain't nothing there. It's also (inexplicably) not an option in Accessibility Shortcuts either. I use Voice Control regularly but not consistently, so I tend to keep it disabled until I need it. It's a hassle to dive into System Preferences every time I want to enable it. Before you ask, the reason that I don't keep it on all the time (but asleep) is that the floating microphone window is **always** in the way of something on my MacBook's screen. I've Googled and Googled and Googled for this. Nada. I have minimal interest in writing an AppleScript/Automator thing to do this... too fragile and finicky for me... but I'm open to all suggestions.

First of all, I'm using Siri and also Voice Control (the accessibility feature) regularly. From time to time, while I'm on a phone call, I get a weird notification of "***to use voice control during a call enable Siri***". Why to enable Siri if it's already enabled? Secondly, when Siri is enabled, **how can I use Voice Control in a phone call**? And why do it need (seems to) Siri for that?

Based on the answer of this question , we can see that the Voice Control feature of MacOS (and probably the one in iOS too) offers unlisted built-in voice commands. For example, the "Control Click" voice command is not listed in System Preferences but is working fine by speaking it when Voice Control in enabled. I would love to ask, where can we find the system file(s), .plist files or other database files related to those unlisted commands? Trying to be more clear, for instance Voice Control also provides a Custom Commands feature, in which a specific user can add it's own private commands (in System Preferences), and after some exploration I found out that those commands are stored and structured in the following path (in macOS Monterey): ***/Users/XXXX/Library/Preferences/com.apple.speech.recognition.AppleSpeechRecognition.CustomCommands.plist*** I want to find a similar system-file that lists the available built-in commands. I saw some, but only with the "published" built-in commands (eg "Double Click", "Close Window"), but without the unlisted hidden ones. P.S. Also, maybe for other question but the same answer, I'd love to know where's the plist/system file that holds the user preferences for checkboxes/selections like "Enable Voice Control", "Language", "Microphone", "Overlay", "Show hints", etc; from System Preferences:

I'm using Voice Control on my laptop, and I'm facing an issue. Whenever I have the cursor in a writable area (e.g. Visual Studio Code, Skype or Slack chat prompts, etc.), the dictation mode starts writing random words. This happens when I'm listening to music or video tutorials, and it becomes frustrating to delete the unintended text. Is there any way to use only the command mode and avoid this problem? Thanks!

Is there any scope for specifically training or teaching it to match individual voice and usage patterns? I would be happy to do whatever is needed to help voice control dictation become more accurate to my voice and vocabulary patterns, but I've been unable to find clear enough indication of under what circumstances it will learn (I'm aware of "add to vocabulary ", I mean any learning it may be doing beyond that - audio, vocabulary signatures, context. In writing this I'm even starting to wonder whether it actually does try to learn your audio, or usage patterns; by which I mean which words you're likely/unlikely to be using, perhaps in any particular context; maybe it doesn't?). If I know what kind of student it is, I can be a better teacher. For example, if I dictate and it gets it wrong, then I correct the incorrect text *using the keyboard*, does it learn from that? Alternatively, if I dictate and it gets it wrong and then *I say "correct that"*, is that what’s needed for it to be taking notice and update its models? I haven't stumbled upon evidence either way as yet. It might be nice to try to design an experiment to find out, but I'm not sure how to proceed on that. Does anybody know if the models Apple are using are open source or proprietary? If they’re open source we might be able to find out a bit more. On the other hand I suppose personally asking an academic expert in the subject might be the best way to proceed... ? It's a pity documentation is so sparse! ---- As an example of this, I don't know whether I should be trying to speak in a certain kind of special accent, in the hope that it would recognise my speech better (as we would actually do for many humans - speaking clearly, adaptive to the listener). It's as if you have an assistant taking dictation, but they're a complete black box and you're totally unable to ask them how they work. I don't feel I have a way to "get to know" this assistant. I wish there was a way to do that. Of course for general speech this isn't really an issue, it works pretty well. The problem arises when you start to talk about technical subjects (which may often actually 'peek in' to "general speech"). One specific frustration is that for some unusual words, the assistant will repeatedly assume you are talking about something else, and there doesn't seem a way to untrain it. For example it often mis-recognises the word "Cortana", when there is no situation ever I would want to use that word, it's not in my vocabulary! This happens because that word is similar to a technical word I want to use (and even with that word added to vocabulary, it still mis-recognises to the word I don't want). So this issue about how it learns does come up if you use it for technical subjects... Voice assistant is an assistant, after all...

I'm trying to create an app to toggle voice control on and off, as for some reason Catalina removed the link between dictation and voice control thus ridding itself of the ability to use a keyboard shortcut for voice commands. I'm trying to ad that back by creating an app. Am ridiculously disabled (think one step below paralysed) and for my setup this functionality had become very useful. Here is what I have so far, but unfortunately its not working:

tell application "System Preferences"
	reveal pane id "com.apple.preference.universalaccess"
	delay 1
	tell application "System Events"
		tell window 1 of application process "System Preferences"
			select table 1 of scroll area 1
			delay 0.1
			select row 12 of table 1 of scroll area 1
			delay 0.1
			click checkbox "Enable Voice Control"
		end tell
	end tell
	quit
end tell

It highlights the correct row in the accessibility options but doesn't quite get as far as clicking the checkbox. Results in this error:

The action “Run AppleScript” encountered an error: “System Events got an error: Can’t get checkbox "Enable Voice Control" of window 1 of application process "System Preferences".”

System Events got an error: Can’t get checkbox "Enable Voice Control" of window 1 of application process "System Preferences".

Could someone please offer some direction on where I'm going wrong? Thank-you!

**TL;DR** I have searched to find a way to hide the icon but still have Voice Control enabled, or at least have a way to permanently move the icon to the dock/menu bar/Launchpad but have found this discussed nowhere. Any suggestions on how I can have Voice Control enabled and have the floating icon permanently stored somewhere out of the way? ---------- In the past year I discovered Dictation for my MacBook Pro. With Mojave the microphone icon was to indicate that dictation was activated. The Keyboard Shortcut I used to switch this on/off was to press either command key twice. I was new to integrating this feature in my daily MBP use when I upgraded to Catalina. The Keyboard Shortcut no longer worked (wether the Voice Control was enabled or not) which was fine because I discovered Voice Control, which I began using and really enjoy. It expands Siri to not just transcribe dictation and enables voice control in every function of my MBP. However, the floating mic icon is *always* on screen. No matter where I put it it is annoyingly in the way. I have searched to find a way to hide the icon but still have Voice Control enabled, or at least have a way to permanently move the icon to the dock/menu bar/Launchpad but have found this discussed nowhere. Any suggestions on how I can have Voice Control enabled *and* have the floating icon permanently stored somewhere out of the way?

Voice control on Monterey (with M1 hardware) is now excellent, and I'm using it all the time for the past few days, along with the head pointer. It's now so good that I'm becoming frustrated that it's not perfect... I'm using ulysses alongside chrome, switching to Ulysses to take notes (by dictation). Sometimes voice control will enter a state where it will respond to commands (such as "press a key" (producing a letter 'a') but will not take continuous dictation. It's could well be a bug, but I'm trying to track it down, or at least isolate cause and effect. No luck yet.. More info: - switching voice control off and on again restores continuous dictation. Before I did that, it was responding only to commands, not continuous dictation. - the microphone level indicator at the bottom right hand of the screen now does not update, perhaps suggesting a high tax on system resources from running voice control; or a lack of optimisation given it is still an early feature. - I'm using an M1 mini with 8 GB of RAM & a usb snowball blue mic. - unlike some enthusiastic reviewers suggested, these machines are not omnipotent. Activity monitor shows memory pressure yellow, and one red spike about when I switch to voice control on and off. I have no other significant applications are running other than chrome with quite a few tabs. - I'm curious whether an M1 with larger memory may not have this issue, but don't have one to test as yet. - I've now found one reliable partial work around/ isolation of the bug. If I have two microphones plugged in, and when it drops out, switch to the other microphone in voice control preferences, continuous dictation returns. This is of course very unergonomic, but it's better than nothing. *Can anyone who has an M1 with 16G+ RAM please check if continuous dictation works reliably without dropping out when switching between applications? I suspect this might help but do not have such a machine to hand at present.*

I'd like to be able to declaim *"Keyword foo"* and have voice control, on hearing this, type :foo for me. Many of the built-in commands take 'parameters' (i.e., some following speech), so if it were possible to make a user defined command as such it would look like keyword , i.e., a 'variable' goes into the command (that variable being "phrase"). Is there a way to make a user-defined command which takes a variable as input, as many of the built-in commands do? That would be super useful. *I'm looking into whether it would be feasible to write code in an IDE (in my case, Clojure & Intellij) using only voice control (and perhaps an on screen control pad for help where needed e.g. that provided by the wacom cintiq), thus, keyboard free! - it would be amazing if this were possible.* I haven't yet explored what can be done with "run workflow". (I don't see any indication as yet that those can take variables, though). I've found the location of the default workflows: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SpeechObjects.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/DictationServices.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Workflows

mbp:Workflows m$ ll
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  12 root  wheel   384B 14 Dec  2019 ./
drwxr-xr-x  65 root  wheel   2.0K 12 Oct 16:30 ../
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel    96B 14 Dec  2019 New Audio Recording.workflow/
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel    96B 14 Dec  2019 New Screen Recording.workflow/
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel    96B 14 Dec  2019 New Video Recording.workflow/
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel    96B 14 Dec  2019 Show Me Apple Website.workflow/
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel    96B 14 Dec  2019 Show Me Top Albums.workflow/
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel    96B 14 Dec  2019 Show Me Top Family Movies.workflow/
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel    96B 14 Dec  2019 Show Me Top Movies.workflow/
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel    96B 14 Dec  2019 Show Me Top Music Videos.workflow/
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel    96B 14 Dec  2019 Show Me Top Songs.workflow/
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel    96B 14 Dec  2019 Take My Picture.workflow/

Update: realised I may be able to get half way to this by defining a command "To keyword", which could issue Alt+. But that's not just a 'keyboard shortcut', it's three presses. I haven't used automator yet but guess that might be able to do this.

I just upgraded to Monterrey and I'm playing with Shortcuts. It struck me as useful to trigger shortcuts from custom voice commands (yes, you can create your own voice commands in Voice Control). But there doesn't seem to be any direct way of doing it. How can I easily link these?

Because I have limited use of my hands, I use Voice Control to dictate most of my text. (I'm using it to speak this question.) Voice Control offers the ability to add custom commands, including those that will run an Automator workflow. Automator, in turn, can execute arbitrary JavaScript or AppleScript. (I prefer JavaScript). What I want to do is to create a script that takes the currently selected text in whatever application is active, manipulates it, and then replaces the selected text in place. For example, imagine creating a "hyphenate this" command that converts selected text like this—"Mac Voice Control scripting"—and changes it to this—"Mac-Voice-Control-scripting". Writing the JavaScript or AppleScript to transform the string is the easy part. The problem is how to get the currently selected text for the current application, whatever it may be. In Automator, you can create a "Quick Action" workflow that is supposed to pass the currently selected text and enable you to replace it. In practice, however, in Big Sur (at least) I could not get this workflow to receive text from any application. Given a standard

()

function, the

array was always of length 0. How do I create a workflow that may be executed by a custom command in voice control that receives, processes, and replaces the currently selected text in the current application?

If I am dictating on my iPad using Voice Control in English, how can I tell Voice Control to switch languages and start expecting German, temporarily?

I recently updated my iPhone 6s from iOS 10 to iOS 11.2. Together with the update **the device started really annoying me by turning on Voice Control on headset button press**. It gets turned on approximately in 30% of the cases. May be it reacts on a longer presses, but anyway I'd better turn this off. I used to use this button to play/pause music and it worked perfectly with iOS 10. I also didn't change my habits - I press it in exactly the same way like I did it before. Voice Control itself is turned off on my device. I used the "Turn off Voice Control on your iPhone" article from the apple documentation to ensure I did it properly. There is also quote in the documentation: > If you're using a headset, and it unexpectedly activates Siri or Voice Control, make sure that your headset is fully inserted into the device. But it is not my case - the headset is fully inserted. I'm also using the headset provided with the device.

I have downloaded Apple Catalina, and I have in enabled Voice control, but the vocabulary option is greyed out. I have the English(Australian) language chosen. How do I enable the vocabulary options so that I can add and modify new words?

I have an iPhone 6S recently updated to iOS 10.0.1. Holding the Home button for about 1 second activates Voice Control, with a characteristic loud double beep. This is very easy to activate accidentally, which is especially undesirable if I am trying to discreetly check my phone during a meeting or something. It's also easy to accidentally push the button when the phone is in my pocket (and locked). I have no interest in actually using Voice Control at all, and it's very important to me that my phone not make unwanted noise. Is it possible to: - Disable Voice Control entirely? - Stop it from beeping when activated? (It doesn't respect the hardware Mute switch.) - Reduce the volume of the beep? (It doesn't seem to respect the ringer volume.) - Prevent Voice Control from activating when the phone is locked? (I would also prefer that unauthorized people not be able to use its features.) I saw https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/124437/disable-voice-control-on-iphone-4s-ios7-1 which suggests turning on Siri. Indeed, Siri has options to disable access on lock screen, and to turn off "voice feedback", making it silent. But for privacy reasons I do not want to enable Siri. Since that question relates to much older versions of hardware and software, I am hoping that something has changed since then. (Also, unlike in that question, my Home button works fine physically.)

My Brother in law has an IPhone 4 (not 4s) with a special kind of durable cover. however this means that the home button gets pressed a lot in his pocket and switches on voice control which does all sorts of weird things. Can you switch off the long press home button voice control? Is there any other solution other than get a new iphone cover?